All about sourcing
Sourcing Strategy
A strong sourcing strategy is the first step to hiring great talent. However, to really develop a pipeline from active sourcing, you should count with a time of 1–3 months (reach out phase, engagement, application, and process). The results are not immediate and that’s why having a fixed hiring plan is so important for Recruiting, is creating a forecast of hirings needed and optimizing the sourcing process, that usually takes around 4 hours per day of research.
What is Sourcing in Recruitment?
In the overall recruiting process, sourcing is the search for passive candidates — those that don’t apply directly to the job opening. The passive candidates can be Referrals, results from the searches made on different tools, guests or speakers in events. The main goal of the Sourcer’s job is to create interest, to engage people in applying to your career opening.
Basically, there is more than one recruitment sourcing method. The way in which these methods are used depends upon a wide variety of factors, some of which include:
- The types of candidates needed.
- The preferences of the hiring managers or recruiters.
- Past success (or lack of success) using a specific method — experimentation.
- The resources at the disposal of the Sourcer.
Having a good sourcing strategy can help to stay ahead in the market and make hiring a competitive advantage for the company.
Sourcing represents searching, engaging and maintaining a healthy network between potential candidates.
Why Sourcing matters?
- Difficult roles: The best people are not actively looking for jobs and are unlikely to apply to a job online. Active sourcing allows you to find and get in touch with the type of people we’re looking for.
- Predictability and forecasting: A proven sourcing strategy can help us attract the right candidate, reduce sourcing time, and focus on key channels, so we can accurately forecast the metric of time to hire.
- Messages: The sourcing activity is a resource to spread our company’s brand. Just like marketing, it’s important to make sure we have the right type of communication at each stage of the funnel to target candidates.
- Other roles: Sourcing is not just for tough roles, but can be applied to almost every role in the company, from interns to senior profiles. The magic of sourcing is to be a Sherlock Holmes and think outside the box to find the best people in the market.
Prepare a sourcing strategy
Before reaching out to candidates, having a clear strategy in place is a way of ensuring that your sourcing efforts are successful. Here are some ways to start the project:
- Align with Hiring Managers: Before we start reaching out to candidates, it’s important to gain alignment with the hiring manager. It’s a matter of being close to the community and ask the manager what it’s needed in his/her team. Establish 5 to 10 key requirements, ask tough questions and crystallize what is actually the activities of the role that’s being requested.
- Talent Mapping: In some cases, such as an executive role or opening a new office, there is only a small pool of people you want to go after. Talent mapping is especially helpful in cases where the profile is too specific or the challenge is to begin a team from zero. Understanding the market and types of companies that would be an ideal fit is necessary, then we just need to reach out for the better ones.
- Nurture: Nowadays we have a competitive hiring market, so most of the time is necessary to have more than just cold emails as part of the strategy. It’s important to know what materials we have in our benefit (perks, branding responses, speakers on events, star talents that can represent the company), check Glassdoor reviews, and blog posts to engage candidates.
- List Building: Instead of reaching out to one candidate at a time, build out a list. Segmenting the list can personalize the messages without sacrificing efficiency. This approach can help scale your hiring quickly, especially for sales, customer operations, and engineering roles, where volume and quality really matters.
Tactics for candidate outreach
- Templates: Building a template with information we can use over and over again is quite important for speed. From there, it’s possible to customize and be specifically based on the candidate and role requested.
- A/B test: What works and what doesn’t? Test the outreach headline, copy content and use the experiment as if it was a marketing campaign.
- Be everywhere: Be where the candidates are: GitHub, Stack Overflow, Quora, Behance.
- Metrics: Establish KPIs for the sourcing strategy. Important questions: How many candidates am I adding to my pipeline? How effective are we?
- Multiple channels: Work or personal email? Use both if needed. Reach out via multiple channels to increase response rates.
- Campaigns: These can be helpful in branding as well. The idea is to develop constant content and use it to engage and drive awareness about our business (Inbound Recruiting).
Sourcing Tools
Twitter and Facebook
Twitter’s advanced search is an excellent tool to find hashtags that can help look into passive candidates. Follow companies that do well in their industry and connect with their people. Facebook’s graph search can help find people who match certain criteria. For example, if you write “salespeople who have studied in São Paulo” in a search, Facebook will return a long list of matching profiles.
More Social Media
Platforms like Instagram, Reddit and Snapchat aren’t as popular for recruiting as professional-oriented sites like LinkedIn or Xing. But, that also means that recruiters will be scarce on these platforms and competition will be lower.
Portfolio/Work sample sites
This works well for creative professionals like designers who contribute to Behance, Dribble, and Carbonmade. Github is also a great option to find developers by looking at specific groups or individual projects. Also, another good alternative for sourcing engineers would be Codercred, Codility, and Hackerank.
Tracking tools
- Tools like People Search, a Chrome extension, work with online communities.
- Hiretual is a good tracking system to find the contact of any person.
- Also, there’s Hunter, a platform that allows you to find contacts, especially social media of any candidate.
In person
- Search sites like meetup.com and eventbrite.com to find relevant events. It’s interesting to check who is on the list and track the best participants of the event.
- Hackathons, career fairs, and campus events are other options to meet great candidates. Hosting your own events is a good idea too.
Referrals
It’s proven that 60% of hirings come through Referrals. Describe the role you’re looking for and brief co-workers on the most important requirements of the role in the process.
Past hiring processes
Check the talent pool in your ATS. Many candidates might have been rejected in the final stage of the hiring process. In the meantime, they could have found other jobs and gained more skills and experience.
Tools and services
If it’s needed extra help, Entelo is a tool that can source people, as well as, AngelList. They offer big databases of resumes.
