Talent Sourcing Strategy: How To Find Great Employees

Sourcing in recruitment is crucial if you want to hire the best talents quickly. Look at it this way.

Imagine your lead developer surprisingly announces s/he is quitting, and you have two weeks to find a replacement. The situation seems like a nightmare, but with a working talent sourcing strategy, it won’t seem like a big deal since you might already know a candidate or two you could contact.

Continue reading to discover what talent sourcing strategy is, why you need one (either as an in-house recruiter or as a remote job recruitment agency employee), and how to develop it.

What is talent sourcing?

Simply put, talent sourcing is the process of identifying, locating, researching potential hires, and networking with them. Respectively, a talent sourcing strategy is the set of tools, procedures, and actions used for finding suitable candidates for further recruitment.

Unlike recruiting, which is about filling specific positions, talent sourcing is a strategic direction aimed at organizing a steady pipeline of promising candidates.

Small companies may not delegate these two stages to different people - sourcers and recruiters - but the larger ones definitely should. This saves them time and costs of finding top professionals and forms an ever-present talent pool.

Looking for potential employees might seem easy, but we have some stats to show you the bitter side of the job market reality.

• 72% of employers struggle to find skilled candidates
• 78% report about candidates changing their mind during the recruitment process
• 50% say their time to hire is one-two months

Add the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the job market to that, and you’ll get the challenges recruiters will face in the years to come. This shows how important it is to have a solid talent acquisition strategy in place.

Do you need more reasons? Here are four of them.

Benefits of having an effective sourcing strategy

Whether you hire remote developers or C-level executives, effective recruiting and hiring strategies can help you in many ways.

Candidate sourcing helps to build a talent pipeline

Qualified talent sources keep in touch with potential candidates and form personal connections with them. All this speeds up the pipeline creation, which, in turn, makes the company’s talent management easy and effective. It doesn’t matter if you use applicant tracking systems (ATS), candidate relationship management systems (CRMS), or maintain your own potential employee database – they all help build a talent pipeline.

Remember: you can’t create a working talent sourcing strategy without planning ahead, locating passive candidates, and engaging with them. The process also includes:

• Encouraging employees to refer people for open positions
• Maintaining connections with candidates through social media
• Meeting candidates in-person during events (e.g., product events, seminars, conference booths)Talent sourcing saves you time

Isn’t it frustrating to walk away from an interview with a potential candidate thinking you just completely wasted an hour of your life? But if you have a pool of skilled, pre-vetted applicants you’re keeping in touch with, the hiring process becomes much more straightforward. And reduced time to hire means reduced costs of filling a position.

Candidate sourcing influences future offer acceptance

Planned recruitment sourcing doesn’t only make your life easier – it also adds to creating a strong employer brand through relationships. And relationships can go a long way. Not only is this the top acceptance factor for many employees, but it can also help companies double their talent pool and decrease the time to hire by 50%.

Sourcing gives you access to references

Getting a review on a candidate can help you avoid hiring the wrong person (and starting the entire process all over). Luckily, thanks to following candidates on social media, talent sourcers can peek at their personalities, not just technical skills. They can also connect with people the candidates have previously worked with to get an honest opinion and select the best company fit.

So, we’ve established that having a sourcing strategy is cost- and time-effective. The question is, how do you develop the one that will work best for you?

7 tips for creating an effective talent sourcing strategy

Every organization and job will require some tailoring, but let this checklist be a starting point for you.

Build a candidate persona

Begin with building an accurate candidate persona through research and interviews. This includes a chat with the hiring and department managers, studying job profiles and market tendencies, understanding motivations and environment. A well-built candidate persona can be the most effective filter for sorting out applications and reducing sourcing time.

Don’t forget about former applicants

Start your search for candidates with the ones who didn’t make the cut last time. Some of them might still be interested in taking a job from you (and may have even upped their game), plus they’re already pre-selected.

Source ahead

This is a good solution for any industry, but it's especially cost-efficient in the long run for tech recruitment agency. Let’s say, the next stage of developing an app will require Python engineers. Starting sourcing them early will increase the chances of hiring on time, arranging a smooth onboarding, and maintaining a calm atmosphere in the team.

Keep track of your sourcing metrics and analyze your progress

If you base your strategies on the data you get from sourcing metrics, you’re winning twice: when you get rid of ineffective tools and when you keep up with new trends and technologies.

Analyzing strategic sourcing metrics allows improving the ways to locate talents, come up with more engaging introductions and reach-out emails, enhance the candidate’s interview experience, and more. The best part? Tracking your progress and analyzing the sourcing activity will save you from repeating the same mistakes.

Build your employer brand

A company’s social media presence, reputation, and culture can be compelling factors for accepting an offer. So don’t hesitate to invest in them. Corporate social media posts, Glassdoor reviews, personal stories can all shape the candidate’s decision. And for 82% of employees, this can make it or break it.

Think outside the box

Sourcing always presupposes engagement with your potential candidates, so it shouldn’t be only about sending invitations on LinkedIn and doing a Facebook search. Go to Behance for creative designers, to Github for engineers, engage in public discussions, research publications, visit events candidates participate in – and invite them to yours. Some of them may appreciate the unique approach, which may influence the acceptance.

Encourage referrals

Professionals of a feather flock together, which is particularly true for the IT community. Asking for referrals can significantly ease the tech hiring process and recruitment in general. You just need to motivate people enough to suggest someone for a particular position. The proven technique? To initiate a referral program and reward your existing employees with the money you’ll save on searching candidates.

The bottom line

Having a working talent acquisition strategy will help you land the right people faster and more cost-effectively. Follow our tips to build your sourcing strategy and keep the best candidates at your fingertips. Yes, maintaining relationships with so many people might be exhausting, but you don’t have to do all that yourself.

Previously published at https://magichire.co/blog/tips-on-developing-a-talent-sourcing-strategy-and-why-you-need-one/