What is an effective candidate sourcing strategy?
Faced with hiring difficulties and increasingly connected candidates, HR agencies are obliged to implement different sourcing strategies to attract to attract and engage candidates and differentiate themselves.
Recruitment has become a real battle. There are more and more jobs to be filled, and the number of qualified profiles available is shrinking. Choice is scarce. It is therefore increasingly important to source candidates carefully, in order to recruit the best profiles.
Thanks to new technologies and other applications, it is becoming easier and easier to to set up tried-and-tested recruitment and and track the sourcing of candidates efficiently.
In this article, our experts explain the strategies you need to adopt to make the most of your business.
The essentials:
- Sourcing is the process of seeking out and identifying potential candidates to meet a recruitment need.
- A well thought-out strategy will enable you to increase your efficiency, raise your profile and build up a pool of relevant candidates.
- Your sourcing strategy is based on 4 key stages: defining your needs, identifying communication channels, creating your approach message and preparing for the qualification interview.
What is sourcing?
Defining sourcing
In many fields, finding candidates is becoming complicated. There are more and more companies recruiting, leading to an over-solicitation of profiles on the market. A developer, for example, may receive ten or so requests per week in his LinkedIn or e-mail inbox.
In this context, it is more important than ever for recruitment agencies toadopt a sourcing strategy. What is sourcing? Sourcing is the process of seeking out and identifying potential candidates to meet a recruitment need.
To put it more concretely, sourcing can be broken down into 4 stages:
- Defining needs (to understand the ideal profile for the position)
- Candidate search (mainly on LinkedIn, but not exclusively)
- Prospecting (sending the most appropriate message to the candidate to maximize his or her chances of getting a response)
- Qualification (a screening call to find out more about the candidate's background, ambitions and fit with the customer's offer)
Why is it important to define a sourcing strategy?
Be careful not to dive headlong into sourcing! Without a strategy in place, you run the risk of getting a very low response rate from candidates. You'll be wasting a lot of time and energy for very little result. The key is to prioritize quality over quantity.
More and more sourcing tools, such as recruitment ATS, are helping recruitment agencies to find candidates more quickly and efficiently. In addition tosaving time and money, these solutions provide you with more qualified profiles that match your needs .
Time is the current constraint for recruitment agencies. By adopting the right sourcing strategy, you can be sure of saving time!
How do you define an effective sourcing strategy?
As you can see, the stakes behind a good sourcing strategy are considerable. Here are the four key steps to defining your sourcing strategy.
Defining needs
One of the first challenges in sourcing is to fully understand the customer's needs.
The aim is to find out as much as you can about the candidate you're looking for: what skills are required, what educational background is best suited to the job, what competitors of the customer's are out there where the ideal candidate could work, and so on. Ask yourself as many questions as possible to get the best possible understanding of the customer's needs.
In recruitment, this is known as defining the candidate persona. Defining the persona means trying to imagine what your customer's ideal future candidate would be like. Don't hesitate to be as precise as possible, asking yourself what would be his or her motivating factors, personality, personal and professional goals...
Be careful, however, not to over-personalize the ideal candidate. Drawing up a portrait of the candidate persona should help you better understand the candidate you're looking for, but shouldn't restrict your search. Above all, don't dwell on discriminating criteria such as gender, age or origin.
The more precisely your needs are defined, the easier it will be to find the right candidates.
Search for candidates
This brings us to the heart of the sourcing strategy! Once you've identified the need, you can start looking for the ideal candidate.
Today, the main source for finding candidates is LinkedIn. It's a handy tool to use to find candidates directly from their past experience, education and skills. Simply enter relevant keywords in the search bar to find candidates for your customers.
Don't hesitate to be creative when prospecting on LinkedIn! Take a look at LinkedIn posts and comments too - it's a great way to identify potential candidates interested in your customers' offers.
But LinkedIn isn't the only source! There are a growing number of specialized networks where candidates post their work and portfolios. If you're looking for a designer, check out Behance. If your client needs a developer, check out the projects on Github or the posts on Ycombinator. Platforms like Malt are also good ways of finding interesting freelance profiles quickly.
You can also look at online CV libraries, such as APEC, Pôle-emploi, Monster, Indeed, Kickbox Open, Keljob or Cadremploi. To find candidates efficiently, don't forget to use Boolean search. This is a technique that allows you to search databases for candidates who correspond exactly to your recruitment needs. You can also use it on Linkedin to save time!
Last but not least, don't forget physical events such as conferences, meet-ups or career fairs at schools and universities. These are good ways of easily recruiting candidates interested in your customers' offers.
In short, be creative and adapt to the sector in which you're recruiting.
Maintaining a pool of candidates is the best way to capitalize on the exchanges and research you've already carried out in the past. This is the strategy that will cost you the least in time and energy, and deliver the best results! MArvin Recruiter enables you to manage your candidate database and create customized lists to implement this strategy.
We advise you to set up co-optation schemes. This can be a good way of attracting new candidates.
Multicasting on job boards isn't exactly a sourcing strategy, since it's the candidate who comes to you, not the other way around. But beware: this strategy may bring you a few interesting applications , but it's very expensive, with no guarantee of recruiting or placing the candidate. In a context of "war for talent", the visibility of advertisements is reduced, and you may soon find yourself having to pay extra to appear at the top of search results.
For more ideas on sourcing techniques, you can read our article on how to source candidates when you have little or no budget.
Let's get prospecting!
That's it, you've found profiles that interest you! Now it's time to approach them, to make them want to know more about your offer andtalk to you.
Candidates are much more solicited than you might think. In order to establish a bond with your candidate, it's essential to personalize your message. Otherwise, your message will be forgotten.
Without personalization, your message risks being irrelevant and not getting a response.
One way of attracting their attention and hoping to get a first qualifying appointment is to start your message by talking about them. You can mention what interests you in their profile, a specific experience or an original feature.
Only then do youexplain your approach, who you are and why you're contacting him and not someone else. This will give them information about the customer and the job, and give them something to think about.
If you want to send out messages easily and on a large scale, don't hesitate to use automation tools like Walaxy or any LinkedIn scrapping tool (Phantombuster, Captain Data, etc.). Simply export the list of candidates from your database (or from an ATS such as Marvin Recruiter) and integrate it into Walaxy for prospecting. You'll save a lot of time!
Preparing for the qualification interview
At this final stage, communication is also very important. After all, this interview is surely the first round in a recruitment process. You'll need to report your discussion and analysis to the other employees involved.
At this stage, we recommend that you retain all candidate data and information.
During the qualification interview, prepare in advance a framework of questions you'd like to ask him/her, to make sure you have all the information you need to decide whether or not to introduce him/her to your customers. This may concern :
- His current missions and achievements that have had a positive impact on the company.
- His ambitions for the rest of his career, what he's aiming for professionally
- His hardskills: his skills, his training.
It's up to you to identify the levers that will sway the candidate! Are they looking for a telecommuting position? What are their location criteria? What are their salary expectations? The type of company and sectors that attract them?
At the end of this interview, you should be able to tell whether the candidate matches your search criteria, and whether it would be appropriate to continue interviewing them, or put them forward as candidates to be contacted again for another position. If so, you'll need to summarize the situation:
- How you found it
- Information provided and received
- Describe the candidate's skills
This first interview will give you a good understanding of your candidate's background and ambitions .
Organized follow-up is highly recommended. For this, there are many integrated recruitment tracking solutions to keep your processes as up-to-date as possible, such as ATS for example.
So you see, adopting a sourcing strategy offers many advantages.
In addition to helping you find qualified profilesa meticulous strategy allows you to gain in efficiency, d'increase your profile and build up a pool of relevant candidates for future recruitment.
Finally, don't forget that the creation of a recruitment sourcing strategy is an experimental and iterative process. Keeping track of the results of your sourcing strategy will enable you to continually improve it.
Would you like to capitalize more effectively on your candidate database? Discover Marvin Recruiter software, designed to cut your sourcing time in half!
