In today’s fiercely competitive market, finding the best people is more critical than ever. That’s where sourcing talent acquisition comes in. But what exactly is “sourcing talent acquisition”? Think of it as being a proactive headhunter. It’s a targeted approach to finding amazing people, even if they aren’t actively searching for new opportunities. This blog will cover how sourcing talent acquisition is essential to gaining a competitive edge and some great tips for creating your own powerful talent pipeline.
Table Of Contents:
- Sourcing Versus Recruiting
- The Powerful Benefits of Sourcing Talent Acquisition
- High-Quality Candidates
- Reduce Time and Cost
- Greater Diversity
- Enhanced Employer Branding
- Engaging with Potential Candidates
- Strategies For Creating A Talent Pool Using Sourcing Talent Acquisition
- Identify The Ideal Candidate
- Build Your Employer Brand
- Explore Diverse Sourcing Channels
- Personalized Communication
- Maintain a Relationship With Your Talent Network
- FAQs about sourcing talent acquisition
- Conclusion
Sourcing Versus Recruiting
While both play a vital role in the hiring process, they involve different strategies and objectives. Traditional recruiting is about filling an immediate need, like creating a job posting and reviewing applications. Sourcing talent acquisition is all about strategy.
You look ahead, anticipating your company’s future needs and identifying highly skilled individuals with the potential to thrive in your company. Even though recruiting and hiring people may be an immediate need for some companies, imagine creating a “talent pool.” This is a collection of individuals who would be a perfect fit when those opportunities do present themselves.
Building connections and relationships with this talent over time helps when you want them to consider a career at your company. Focusing on talent pools ensures that you have a pipeline of qualified candidates ready when a job opportunity arises.
The Powerful Benefits of Sourcing Talent Acquisition
Sourcing talent acquisition provides numerous benefits to companies of any size. It requires something that traditional recruitment doesn’t: dedicated effort to proactively seek out candidates.
A robust talent pipeline, fueled by effective sourcing, enables businesses to adapt to changing market dynamics, respond swiftly to emerging opportunities, and maintain a competitive edge. Sourcing talent is essential for businesses looking to create a robust talent pipeline that aligns with their long-term goals.
High-Quality Candidates
Let’s face it, some of the best people for your company are already employed and excelling in their roles. This is the talent you should be setting your sights on: individuals with proven track records, in-demand skills, and a strong desire to contribute.
When hiring managers report that 42% of resumes from applicants don’t meet a role’s requirements, you can see why sourcing talent acquisition is such a great option for building a solid workforce. Following a highly refined Talent Sourcing Process allows you to reach out to these passive candidates and entice them with the right job opportunity.
Reduce Time and Cost
Following traditional sourcing process methods of posting jobs and sorting through applications can take weeks and aren’t always successful. This makes the entire candidate sourcing and hiring process painfully long. Research shows that attracting great employees can help businesses cut costs.
A proactive sourcing strategy keeps a pool of interested candidates ready to go, reducing lag time when positions need to be filled. This is because you’ll have a network of pre-screened talent waiting in the wings. This streamlined approach allows businesses to positions faster and with reduced recruitment costs.
Greater Diversity
It’s easy to fall back on familiar networks when trying to fill a role quickly, but that doesn’t always yield a diverse workforce. Building diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives is incredibly important when forming a team.
This allows time to seek talent beyond your usual circles, reaching people from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Sourcing talent acquisition gives you time to build a team of highly skilled individuals from underrepresented talent pools.
Enhanced Employer Branding
When you build an employer brand that resonates with the best people, your recruiting becomes way more effective. It’s not just about selling a job.
It’s about promoting what makes your company culture special and sharing the inspiring work your teams are doing. Employer branding showcases the people who work for you and what they’ve accomplished. You’ll be showing potential candidates your company’s core values.
This attracts those individuals who want their own success to contribute to yours. Employer branding is not just about attracting talent; it is also about retaining the talent you already have. By creating a positive and supportive work environment, you can reduce employee turnover and save on the costs of hiring and training new employees.
Engaging with Potential Candidates
Reaching out to potential candidates may seem intimidating but consider this: ninety percent of global professionals are open to exploring new career opportunities, even if they aren’t actively seeking work. However, they aren’t necessarily browsing job boards or sending out applications.
This is where you, as a sourcer, play a vital role. Engaging passive candidates takes effort. Nurture the connection over time by building genuine relationships, learning about their aspirations, and sharing insights into your company’s mission.
Building relationships through social media, particularly in your niche, is incredibly effective. Using platforms like social media lead generation can get a significant improvement in response rates over standard job postings.
Strategies For Creating A Talent Pool Using Sourcing Talent Acquisition
If your talent management needs are about more than just hiring for specific positions, you need to have a plan to keep those highly skilled, talented people engaged, even if a specific position doesn’t yet exist. This will make it easier to conduct job searches in the future. This recruitment strategy starts with:
Identify The Ideal Candidate
Determine the necessary skills, education, experience, and any industry certifications you want to prioritize. This detailed outline gives you criteria to measure talent against.
It’s a smart way to hire local candidates from the talent pool available to you. You’ll be better equipped to identify individuals who possess the skills needed to excel in your company. Clearly defined job requirements enable you to focus your sourcing efforts on the most promising candidates.
Build Your Employer Brand
Showcase what makes your company awesome and get potential employees excited about contributing to your mission. Remember, you want the candidate to view joining your team as beneficial to their own growth and development.
Highlighting your employer brand through the stories your employees tell gives insight into what it’s like to work for you. This means emphasizing how much you value the talent on your team, along with company benefits, the culture you’ve cultivated, career paths available, and how your teams consistently meet objectives.
Creating a positive employer brand gives potential talent more to relate to. You can then tap into this talent community and potentially source qualified candidates when the time is right.
Explore Diverse Sourcing Channels
You can utilize niche job boards, networking events and professional networking sites, social media platforms and groups related to specific industries or roles, and attend industry conferences, workshops, career fairs and webinars to establish a network of individuals.
Consider connecting with potential talent through online forums or niche communities that focus on specific areas of expertise, such as Github or Stack Overflow for technology professionals. Utilizing social media and email marketing can have great ROI.
Research indicates that ROI from email marketing can be as high as 3800%. That is a substantial return that may make dedicating a few staff members to managing your employer brand very worth it. This ensures you are consistently reaching out to potential candidates.
Another highly effective channel for attracting talent is employee referral programs. People are more likely to want to be part of your team if someone they know and respect recommends it. Employee referrals potentially broaden the talent pool by introducing you to people in their own networks.
You are also creating a sense of belonging within your team by giving your staff a way to take ownership over the success of the company. Having an active employee referral program allows everyone on the team to be engaged in building and improving your business. These traditional recruitment methods are often overlooked but can yield high-quality candidates.
Personalized Communication
Sending generic outreach messages rarely get good results. Get to know the candidates and reach out with specific examples of their work and achievements. Connect their unique skills with potential opportunities to add to the positive trajectory of your business.
The candidate is more likely to consider becoming a part of your team if they know how their efforts will contribute to its overall success. This is where having data-driven insights into your talent pool can be invaluable. You’ll want to focus your initial contact on the value proposition you offer to potential candidates.
Maintain a Relationship With Your Talent Network
Think of it like a long-term investment. Stay in contact with those highly skilled candidates who pique your interest, whether a job opening currently exists or not. Keep them engaged with your employer brand and showcase recent company achievements that demonstrate the exciting, dynamic nature of the work you do.
When a role becomes available that seems a perfect fit, that relationship has been in place for awhile, giving you a real headstart to bringing top-quality talent into the company. This nurturing will improve their response rate to joining the team while building a loyal talent pool of individuals who share your vision for creating innovative products or services.
FAQs about sourcing talent acquisition
What is a sourcer in talent acquisition?
A sourcer in talent acquisition focuses on researching, identifying, and engaging with potential candidates for specific roles. Their primary goal is to create a pool of highly qualified candidates for a specific open position or even to have talent on deck for when an opening becomes available.
Sourcers are highly skilled in internet research, social media, and online networking. They may also use various sourcing strategies to find potential candidates, including online databases, Boolean searches, and social media recruiting.
What does sourcing mean in talent?
Sourcing talent involves a proactive, strategic approach to uncovering individuals with desirable skills, experience, and cultural fit for an organization’s workforce, even if those individuals aren’t actively looking for a new job. It’s about identifying talent, building relationships with them over time, and getting them excited about the possibility of working for the company.
This approach is highly effective because 86% of the best candidates for specific positions are already employed. It requires a deep understanding of the job market, industry trends, and the competitive landscape.
What is sourcing in recruiting?
Sourcing, as part of the recruiting process, focuses on finding suitable candidates who haven’t necessarily submitted an application for a specific position. Imagine, for instance, looking for a software engineer with very niche skill sets. It is highly unlikely that this individual is putting themselves out there on a general job board.
But their specific skills might make them the perfect candidate to contribute to an open project your company is working on. Sourcing is a more proactive way to uncover, reach out to, and build connections with highly desirable candidates who would otherwise go unnoticed.
What does a talent acquisition sourcing specialist do?
A talent acquisition sourcing specialist does more than just find talent. This individual is a true talent seeker, utilizing every possible talent source to build out their talent pipeline. This job is multifaceted, with a lot of behind-the-scenes research and engagement with candidates involved.
It takes time to really analyze what an ideal candidate would look like. These individuals find the right talent by utilizing research tools and techniques: searching online databases and portfolios, attending industry-related events or even exploring diversity job boards or online communities.
Once a strong candidate is found, building that relationship with the potential candidate falls under their responsibilities. Getting a candidate interested in exploring opportunities at your company relies heavily on personalized communication to help foster a positive connection between them and the company’s culture. They also play a crucial role in building and maintaining a strong employer brand, which is essential for attracting and retaining top talent.
Conclusion
As the workforce evolves and more of our business is conducted through a remote platform, attracting great talent using the global talent pool will be critical for building teams. Sourcing talent acquisition is more critical than ever before. It’s about more than filling an open job; it’s about getting out ahead and looking for talent, engaging with them, and introducing them to opportunities they may never have otherwise explored.
This process will have significant returns when you make a plan to actively attract highly qualified individuals from underrepresented pools while creating a positive local talent pipeline. Doing this will contribute to the continued growth and overall success of your company.
