Record-low unemployment rates, as well as the rise of online job boards and career sites, has transformed the job market from an employer-driven market to a candidate-driven market. While a simple online job posting may still have the power to generate an onslaught of interested candidates, it is the quality of those candidates that is lacking. In fact, 45 percent of all small business owners claim to have a difficult time attracting qualified candidates.
The Need to Attract Passive Candidates
The problem is not that top talent candidates don’t exist. It’s about knowing where to find them. Posting job announcements may generate interest from those actively looking for a job, but in a market where as much as 85 percent of the talent pool are passive candidates, this tactic is not enough. Chances are that passive candidates aren’t searching the online job boards on a regular basis. In order to tap into the entire talent pool, your recruitment strategy must include smart sourcing.
What Is Smart Sourcing?
The standard, full-cycle recruitment process puts the recruiter in charge of the entire hiring process from sourcing potential candidates to making the job offer. Smart sourcing, on the other hand, places an emphasis on understanding your ideal candidates first, in order to create customizable value that enables you to connect and attract your most prospective top talent candidates, by moving sourcing from a practice within the recruitment process to a full stand-alone function.
Why Smart Sourcing for Recruitment?
According to the Society of Human Resource Management, more than two-thirds of the organizations surveyed admit to having trouble finding the right talent for their job openings. With so many businesses having trouble attracting the right candidate, is it easy to see why there’s a need in the recruitment process to identify your most prospective candidates, know where to find them and how to start a meaningful conversation.
Sourcing agents focus on one thing and one thing only: attracting the best candidates for the position. They understand candidate behavior data and provide the hiring team with insight as to how prospective candidates think, act and behave online. Smart sourcing in partnership with recruitment can help create a human-centric candidate experience and improve the overall quality of the candidate pool.
Benefits of Smart Sourcing
Today’s recruitment is more competitive and more advanced than ever before. In order to be successful as a recruiter, you need to understand your candidates first, especially when you have the difficult task of recruiting passive candidates. Smart sourcing offers the solutions you need by identifying online candidate behavior, creating and developing a meaningful on-going conversation with candidates, and providing value in each step of the candidate journey. Ultimately, smart sourcing is necessary in order to create a successful recruitment strategy.
Tips for Implementing Smart Sourcing
The following three tips will allow you to implement smart sourcing seamlessly into your hiring strategies.
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- Sourcing as a Dedicated Role
Smart sourcing must be implemented as a dedicated role in the hiring process. Sourcing agents typically work directly with the recruiter or recruitment team in order to create a seamless recruiting process for the candidate.
- Align Sourcing Tactics with Recruitment Strategy
Your business should establish clear smart sourcing goals that align with the ongoing demands of the business. Comprehensive candidate profiles and personas will enable sourcing agents to develop sourcing tactics that attract the best candidates for the job.
- Create a Continuous Candidate Pipeline
Companies must make the switch from a reactive hiring strategy, where they only start to source candidates once a position becomes available, to an active hiring strategy, where sourcing agents create a continuous pipeline of potential candidates. This can improve conversion rates and speed up the hiring process.
If your company wants to attract more passive candidates, you must make sourcing a priority. Tulsie specializes in smart sourcing solutions and can help your company find, attract and engage with the best candidates for your specific company. Learn more about Tulsie’s smart sourcing solutions today.
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