With so many different kinds of social media channels and online forums it might feel a bit daunting to start a sourcing project, where do you even start?! In this web of possibilities, let’s focus on building fly-traps that are efficient and fun at the same time. We’re starting out with the two steps that should exist in every sourcing strategy.
Become an expert on job requirements
Study jobs as if they were your SATs. The more you know about each job, the more efficiently you’ll be able to seek out relevant candidates.
- What exactly is required for each job?
- The successful people in this role, what do they do right?
- Which skills are needed?
- What unexpected traits and skills are beneficial in this role?
The easiest way to get a great understanding of what a particular role entails is to interview the person in that role. Doing so completely removes the guessing game from your sourcing and instead enables you to focus whole-heartedly on the correct things.
Build the candidate profile
When you’ve pinned down the exact job requirements, it’s time to build the ultimate candidate profile. Compared to step one, it might not always be beneficial to talk to the person who has the job, but instead talk to the manager since they might be better at describing what makes a certain person suitable for that specific position.
- What is person X great at and that really takes their work to the next level?
- Why were they hired?
- Do they have any skills or traits that turned out to be unexpectedly beneficial for the role at hand?
Build and save each candidate profile that you build. Test them out in reality and adjust them accordingly if they turn out to be flawed.
Before we move on, please read this disclaimer:
These are just examples of strategies. They absolutely function in more constellations than what we’re writing here. Please combine them however you like and see fit in your work.
Before you start your hunt, are you sure the candidate you’re looking for is not in your vicinity? What about all those passive candidates in your ATS or CRM system? Are you up to date with what they’re doing nowadays or are they simply greyed out ghosts in your lists? Activate them! Reach out and see what they’re up to. Chances are they might be exactly who you’re looking for.
The other side of the same coin of this is referrals. It might sound a wee bit stalker:ish but are you taking notes on what the friends of your friends are doing? Asking around in your own community is a great starting point for any sourcing endeavour.
The point of this strategy is to act as a reminder of the elephant in the room, the candidate you need might be just in front of your eyes. This should be on top of mind whenever you begin sourcing.
Method 1.1 - Programmatic recruitment
If you’re familiar with paid marketing you know that you can reach your target audience by letting the ad manager know who you want to reach with your messaging. Similar to this is programmatic recruitment which refers to relying on technology (big data analytics, AI) to automate and streamline your recruitment process. In short, by utilizing artificial intelligence, programmatic recruiting assess data to make recommendations based on past results combined with real-time information. The algorithms help make decisions regarding: how much to spend on promoted placement, where a job should be posted, what sites to use, etc.
If you start using a tool like this, you’ll quickly notice that you receive more suitable candidates. On top of this you’ll see that you’ve managed to save up a lot of time and can relieve some of the pressure off your shoulders.
What is important though is that you have data to work with. The AI can learn, with the help of past successful hires, who got the job and their characteristics. Based on this it can more easily navigate where to place ads and so forth.
This is a great list of tools to get you started.
A relatable issue is that of not being able to find contact information of the people you want to reach. Connecting with people on LinkedIn and hoping they’ll reply can quickly become cumbersome. As of late we’ve seen “sourcing assistants/scraping tools” pop up as your new tool for sourcing efficiently without having to do much yourself, apart from knowing where your needed candidates may hang out. A sourcing assistant usually exists as a plug-in in your menu bar in your web browser. DuxSoup and Prophet II are examples of these tools. But Prophet II is more commonly used for hiring purposes.
How do they work? Go to any company page and start the email scraping from your menu bar. The tool then extracts the emails it finds on that website along with contact information. You can search with titles, locations, companies, skills, and exclusions. It sounds like complete sorcery but luckily, it isn’t. You’re no longer limited to conduct sourcing on LinkedIn. You can use the sourcing assistant on websites like GitHub, Behance, and about.me.
When the scraping is done and you feel like you’ve gathered enough relevant candidates you can extract the information and export it into your ATS to keep it structured. By doing so, you’ll also simplify your next sourcing adventure because you’ve already fetched possible candidates for the next job in line.
Some companies offer full-circle sourcing software that supports you with everything from finding talent to connecting with them. A software like SeekOut uses AI to help you discover hard-to-find talent in a multitude of ways. For example, by subscriping to their service you get access to a library of talents and you get a candidate engagement tool which enables you to easily connect with the candidates you’re interested in. They also offer the possibility to integrate their solution to your existing ATS.
The perks of full-service tools like these is that you can do everything from one place and you don’t have to import/export numerous of files back and forth into various systems.
We hope that you with these tips can further heighten your sourcing abilities and that you can be freed from inefficient sourcing methods.
