Sourcing Candidates

Table of Contents

• What is candidate sourcing?
• Why should I use candidate sourcing software?
• Candidate Sourcing Tools
• What is the best site for candidate sourcing?

What is candidate sourcing?

Candidate sourcing is the initial part of the recruiting process – where recruiters (or specialized sourcers) search to find quality candidates. Searching for specialized talent is often referred to as talent sourcing. During the candidate sourcing process, hiring teams collect resumes, applications, and other essential candidate information and pre-screen candidates for current and future job openings. Some of the best places to source for talent include:

• Social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook
• College recruiting fairs
• In-market trade schools
• Referrals from your existing team
• Company website and company job board

Sourcing is no longer considered just the gathering of candidate names and resumes. It is part of a company’s overall talent acquisition strategy to find passive candidates. After all, sometimes the best fit for a specialized job is by a candidate who is not actively looking for a job.

Why should I use candidate sourcing software?

With unemployment consistently around 4%, it is increasingly difficult for hiring professionals to find top talent. Factor in specialized talent, diversity, and candidates with deep experience, the task difficulty goes up significantly. To manage this hurdle in the past, hiring teams either upped their game or turned to third-party recruiters – which can be cost prohibited for multiple hires.

With hiring teams already stretched thin, innovative teams are strategizing on how to work smarter and are turning to recruiting software, such as applicant tracking systems (ATS), candidate relationship software (CRM), and sourcing tools. Candidate sourcing software can help you and your hiring team:

• Optimize your messaging to potential candidates
• Get deeper insights with key data points
• Increase candidate engagement
• Get candidate-specific insights

Candidate sourcing software can help you attain your goal of building the top of your recruiting funnel to fast-track quality candidates.

Candidate Sourcing Tools

The best recruiting sourcing tools help hiring professionals to increase their ability to form relationships with candidates and leverage those relationships to hire top talent to fill open positions. The marketplace is filled with sourcing software options; where to start can be overwhelming. But the answer is simple – start at the foundation, the ATS (applicant tracking system.) The best ATS software already contains powerful sourcing tools. In addition to streamlining the entire hiring process from source to hire, providing powerful analytics to measure the success of recruiting and hiring strategies, and effectively managing compliance, a successful ATS software also contains powerful recruiting sourcing tools including:

• Career page builder – builds, maintains, and manages
• Candidate portal
• Automated interview requests to candidates via email and texts
• Scan, sort, and rank candidates
• Event management
• Collaboration platform for interaction between recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates
• Post to a wide range of job boards with a single submission

Once you’ve built a solid foundation with an ATS, a native CRM (candidate relationship management) software will further assist you with your sourcing objectives. With the ultimate goal of increasing your overall talent pool of passive candidates who may be interested in working for your company, CRM software helps you create a positive brand experience by treating future job candidates as customers. Once fully implemented, the users of the recruitment CRM software are ready to:

• Engage and nurture candidates with email and text functionality
• Create a positive candidate experience
• Employ drip campaigns for top of mind awareness
• Increase collaboration across the hiring team
• Reduce reactive recruiting
• Deliver on time hiring at a lower cost
• Expand talent pools

With the functionality of CRM software, recruiting teams can effectively expedite their sourcing efforts, engage with qualified talent, and reduce overall costs as the needs for outsourced agencies.

Hiring teams that need additional sourcing efforts next turn to candidate sourcing software. Good sourcing platforms will surface talent against your open roles through matching algorithms. Once the sourcing teams review process has been completed, appropriate outreach against the list of candidates will commence in order to gain the level of interest and permission for compliance purposes from the candidates. With open APIs and a marketplace for third-party vendors, integration between your ATS, native CRM, and candidate sourcing software should be seamless and will create a powerful sourcing synergy.

What is the best site for candidate sourcing?

Job boards are not a one size fits all solution. There are a number of factors involved when determining the best options for your needs. For example, are you seeking the best product developers or sales professionals? Some sites have both, but there are specialty job sites that focus on specific types of job seekers. Beyond the roles, companies are focused on ensuring the best culture outcomes through key diversity and inclusion initiatives. There are hundreds of job sites globally, and all have their own strengths and weaknesses. In short, there is no perfect option for all companies. The ultimate way to determine the best sites for your company is to consult with your current technology and process partners, then test several options against open roles before investing too heavily. Once the data insights are available (quantity, quality, costs…), you can then build your strategy around the highest performing sites.

An alternative to this approach would be to leverage a technology partner that manages all of this process for you through programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising allows a company to provide a fixed budget against their desired roles and hiring requirements. The engine then automatically allocates the necessary budget toward the jobs and proper channels. This approach yields better candidates for less money.