As a recruiter, you must draw in exceptional candidates to keep your organization advancing. Not only can sourcing top candidates give you a competitive edge, but hiring the right talent can help your business appeal more to your clients. Sourcing is also key to your recruitment strategy. All of these points are positive and beneficial to your organization. So, if you’re unsure about what sourcing is and how to do it efficiently, but want to know more, here’s all you need to know about sourcing, sourcing vs recruiting, and how sourcing tools can boost your recruitment strategy.
What is sourcing?
Sourcing candidates is a process that includes hunting for top talent. It also involves reaching out to talent and engaging them, with aim of filling the vacancies of your company.
Talent sourcing also means focusing on 70% of candidates who are passive jobseekers. By using recruitment sourcing methods, you will be able to widen your candidate pool and begin attracting passive jobseekers.
So, your target might be to attract active jobseekers, but keeping one eye on passive jobseekers is important when employing your talent sourcing strategy.
Effective talent sourcing means the difference between attracting candidates and promoting the company brand. This is why going to business events counts as talent sourcing. Some other talent sourcing options you should consider include:
- Getting your messages for the outreaching process correct
- Emphasizing the brand of your organization
- Reaching out to candidates with follow-up emails
Sourcing vs recruiting: how is sourcing different from recruiting?
The main difference between talent sourcing vs recruiting is that sourcing occurs before recruiting. The other difference is that those who source candidates are not responsible for handling job applications that their organization receives via a job board.
Recruitment sourcing methods involve:
- Searching for passive jobseekers
- Making use of social media and sourcing channels for recruitment
- Carrying out resume searches on search engines
Recruiting relies on talent sourcing, but is a separate process. Recruiting happens after talent sourcing. The process involves:
- Uploading job descriptions to job boards
- Analysing the applications that the organization receives
- Communicating back and forth between the organization and their applicants
An HR professional could be responsible for carrying out recruitment sourcing methods and recruiting as well. This can sometimes be the case in smaller HR departments, whereas in larger departments it’s more likely these responsibilities are separate.
How does sourcing work?
The sourcing process works like this. An HR professional proactively begins the search for promising talent and candidates who could potentially join the team and fill a vacancy. It involves:
- Gathering resumes and applicant documents
- Carrying out pipelining activities
- Keeping an eye on key metrics related to sourcing
Part of this process can involve prescreening applicants in line with the vacancy that is open, or to fill an upcoming, future vacancy. Later, screening in recruitment is carried out during the recruitment stage.
A talent sourcing role also involves knowing the ideal places to search for candidates. Typical talent sourcing locations are:
- Candidate referrals that your team members might give you
- LinkedIn and Twitter channels (and social media)
- Job boards
- Business events
To help with these steps, an HR professional will normally make use of certain candidate sourcing tools. One such tool is a candidate relationship management tool (CRM) or applicant tracking system. Others you might be interested in are email tracking tools and template analytics tools.
Advantages of using candidate sourcing tools
You’ll find that there are plenty of advantages to using candidate sourcing tools for talent sourcing. Right at the top of the list is that they make talent sourcing quicker and more organized. Some other advantages include that:
- They reduce the costs that come with recruitment
- They make candidate data easy to analyse
- They give your organization’s brand a boost
In terms of enhancing brand reputation, talent sourcing tools lift the candidate experience with their efficiency. A positive candidate experience means that even if you don’t hire a particular candidate during the recruitment stage, they will talk about your brand positively with others.
Disadvantages of using candidate sourcing tools
According to LinkedIn, some recruiting tools may be over-hyped and make more promises than they deliver. This is one of the main drawbacks of candidate sourcing tools.
Another potential issue is handling multiple recruitment tools at once. This can lead to wasted time as you switch between each tool. A candidate relationship management tool can help with this, enabling you to achieve email marketing (automated to save time) and plenty of other time-consuming tasks all from the same tool.
Finally, if you’re not familiar with how candidate sourcing tools work, you might find that training is required to get up to speed.
Find out more about candidate sourcing tools
Despite their drawbacks, talent sourcing tools are being used more frequently by HR professionals around the world. The main reason for this is that they are saving candidate sourcing experts time, which leads to company savings.
If you want to discover more about candidate sourcing tools, explore Recruitmenttech.com for more information.
