Hiring managers use talent sourcing to identify candidates with critical skills and qualifications. The strategic talent sourcing enables hiring managers to engage with candidates and quickly fill job openings.
Maintain a strong pipeline by encouraging your employees to recommend their peers for open roles at your organization. Employees who are referred are more likely to stay with your company longer.
How to Perform Strategic Talent Sourcing to Maximize Resources for Optimal Results
Identify Your Sourcing Needs
You must know what kinds of candidates you’ll need to improve your time-to-fill and overall recruiting process performance. To do this, look at your company’s growth and assess departmental needs, critical skills, and candidate attributes.
Once you know your talent sourcing needs, you can create a strategy to maximize resources for optimal results. Some examples of strategic talent-sourcing include:
- Networking in targeted communities (such as coder meetups),
- Professional social media sites, and
- Using recruiting software tools.
Additionally, you are leveraging your company’s employees to attract top candidates. You can do this by sharing positive stories of your employees and engaging with job seekers on social media. You can also host or sponsor job fairs and career expos to meet potential candidates face-to-face. Finally, tapping into your existing candidate database is a great way to save time in the sourcing process. Use a customer relationship management or applicant tracking system. It will help to search for candidates and resurface older prospects you engaged with months (or even years) ago.
Develop a Sourcing Strategy
A successful strategic talent sourcing process will develop a steady pipeline of qualified candidates to be contacted when needed. This saves time and money in the long run. Particularly, if your company has a hard-to-fill role or high-level position like senior talent management that requires specialized skills.
Recruiters and HR professionals use various sourcing strategies to identify potential candidates. That includes – recruiting software, professional social networking platforms, job boards and websites, career fairs, employee referrals, and recruitment agencies. Additionally, many companies also maintain a database of talent they have already sourced and recruited in the past.
Whether this is through your applicant tracking system or other recruiting software, it is essential to catalog any talent you have previously sourced. Because, by doing this, you can easily find and engage them again when a new position becomes available. This allows you to leverage your existing candidate pool. Also, it ensures you aren’t overlooked by passive candidates who might not be actively looking for a job.
Create a Sourcing Pipeline
Having a strategic talent sourcing pipeline in place for roles that are difficult to fill saves time and money during the hiring process. It also helps companies build a diverse workforce and close talent gaps by identifying candidates from various sources.
Keeping the lines of communication open with the candidates in your pipeline is critical to ensure they remain engaged. Keep them updated on company happenings and let them know you’re always looking for future positions that might fit them.
You should track your sourcing results. It may include:
- The candidate pipeline conversion rate (the number of candidates you recommend to recruiters who are interviewed and hired).
This is an excellent metric for evaluating the effectiveness of your sourcing strategy.
Track Your Strategic Talent Sourcing Results
A high-quality candidate pipeline is vital to the success of any organization. Strategic sourcing can take up to 36 days on average for talent teams to hire a new employee.
A comprehensive candidate database in your recruiting applicant tracking system (ATS) allows many ways. So, you can resurface candidates that you and others on your team engaged with months or even years ago. This can greatly cut your hiring time. It happens when a manager needs a new role needing special skills or a certain experience level.
Monitoring your sourcing results is essential to understanding the effectiveness of your team’s efforts. The team’s metrics include:
- Application-to-interview conversion rates,
- Sourcing channel effectiveness, and
- Job offer acceptance rates.
These can help you adjust your candidate-attracting strategies to boost hiring efficiency. Moreover, these can improve the candidate experience, increase hiring speed, and save money on your recruiting budget.
Also Check: What Is Staffing, Recruiting, Tech Staffing And IT Staffing?
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