Sometimes, having too many options becomes a problem. With a host of channels and tools available for candidate sourcing in the market today, recruiters are struggling to pick the best that works for them. In this blog, we decipher the 7 strategies you have to keep in mind while sourcing candidates.
- Build a candidate persona
- Leverage sourcing channels
- Identify the right tech tools
- Proactively source candidates
- Automated engagement practices
- Diversity in candidate sourcing
- Tracking metrics
Read on to discover the success formula you need to hire the best passive talent, to really hit the bull’s eye.
1. Build a candidate persona
Who said recruitment doesn’t involve fiction writing? Have some fun and create a narrative about the person that you want to hire. Having this clarity of thought will save you a lot of time while you’re sourcing candidates. Let’s explore how you can build a candidate persona.
Speak to stakeholders
Start by setting up calls with the hiring manager and the team members. By speaking to the team, you can understand the gap they’re trying to fill, and look for the candidate with the skills required to fill that gap.
For instance, if the open role has the designation as video marketer, speak to the marketing head to understand the business intent of hiring for this role, and speak to the product/content/events team to understand the deliverables they expect from this video marketer. Once you’ve spoken to them, you will have a fair idea of what to expect.
Speak to candidates
After speaking with internal stakeholders, you know the skills required. Now, you need to understand the industry trends, and for that, it’s best to speak with external folks.
You can speak to other video marketers themselves to understand what they’re looking to learn or what kind of workplace culture appeals to them, or speak to other marketing professionals to learn more about how they went about hiring the video marketer in their team.
Once you have grasp on the industry trends, you can set the right expectations within the team, and also communicate better with promising candidates.
Write the narrative for your candidate persona
After you’ve done your research, you can write down the candidate persona. This will help you in applying filters while sourcing candidates. Bonus: we’ve attached a free template to help you easily write your candidate persona!
2. Leverage sourcing channels
You can source candidates via four primary channels:
- Job posting sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, GitHub
- Running referral programmes within your org
- Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
- Events and job fairs
If your recruitment needs are largely outbound, the most preferred channels for sourcing passive talent is hunting on job posting sites and running internal employee referral programs. We explore more on how you can make full use of these channels in the next section.
3. Identify the right tech tools, make full use of them
The most preferred way to source candidates is via job posting sites. Since there are a range of sites, you can make use of tech tools to add ideal candidates from across channels to your talent pool. And that’s where Kula Flows comes in. Kula Flows makes one-click sourcing possible across the internet: across LinkedIn, GitHub, and more. Learn more here.
Love the sourcing with chrome extension. Kula helps us source diverse candidates based on our priorities. - Sonal Singh, Head of Talent Acquisition, Dezerv
The second preferred way to source candidates is via internal referrals, but running referral programs within an org is exhausting and chaotic. This is again another place where you can leverage tech.
Enter Kula Circles. With Kula Circles, you can access all the connections of your org’s employees. You can access a warm candidate list with all your employee networks combined. Once you have access to this data, you can ramp up sourcing with filters for companies, locations, industries, and more. And with this tool, all you have to do is request warm intros from connected colleagues in a click, across any channel of choice. Perk: both the referrer and the recruiter can track the hiring journey for each referred candidate. No more awkward follow-ups on either side.
Kula Circles is one of those products which centralises the madness and chaos of referral. - Jay Joshi, Recruiter, Cred
4. Proactively source candidates
Don’t wait for a role to open up to engage in finding a candidate base. Focus on building relationships with potential candidates and fits at a steady pace, and build a bank you can mine from when the need arises. How exactly can you make proactive sourcing a practice?
Constantly tap into internal employee networks
If an employee sends you the CV of a friend they think will be a great fit for the company, go ahead and start a conversation, even if you don’t have a role open for them. Nurture that relationship, and when something opens up, you can bring them on loop.
Use tech like Kula Circles to constantly research from within your org’s networks and add the good profiles to your candidate bank.
Another tip is to be active on social media.
Send connection requests to prospects, speak to other recruiters, if a competitor has laid off employees, go ahead and reach out to them
5. Automated engagement practices
To truly focus on your sourcing efforts, you need to automate most of your other tasks. And the first order is automating your outreach messages. With Kula Flows, you can achieve this, and build 10-step sequences with hyper-personalised emails, automate InMails, and connect on LinkedIn to convert best-fit passive candidates at scale.
I have achieved 70% response rates from candidates using Flows. The automation really works across channels. - Sughra Zaidi, Recruiter, Cricket.com
Related Read: How AI in Recruiting Transforms Talent Acquisition Processes
6. Diversity in candidate sourcing
Quoting this Forbes article penned by Achuthanand, who has over a decade of experience sourcing candidates for core teams at Uber, Stripe, and Freshworks, there are four steps to achieving DE&I success in sourcing candidates:
- Assessing the current data and lay of land
- Penning achievable long and short term goals
- Facilitating solutions
- Reiteration and tracking of these solutions
7. Tracking metrics
Lost in your daily tasks and quarterly goals, you miss out on keeping track of your efforts. This is simply because you’re spending so much of your time on outbound — identifying suitable candidates, building a talent pipeline, drafting messaging templates, and outreach timelines. However, keeping track of the sourcing metrics to measure the success of your outbound recruiting efforts is key to impactful recruiting in the long scheme of things.
Let’s take a quick look at the metrics that you need to track:
Response rate: The number of messages sent to the number of responses received. If you’ve sent 50 messages, and received 25 responses, that’s a 50% response rate.
Conversion rate: The number of candidates that hiring managers shortlist from the list you send across to them. If you send 50 profiles, and they shortlist 5, then the conversion rate is 10%
Channel effectiveness: The number of people you hired from a particular channel. If you got 50 applications from LinkedIn, and hired 5, then that’s 10%
Sourcing productivity: The number of emails, calls and messages sent as a part of outreach
Pipeline speed: The amount of time from when the candidate is first contacted to until they accept the offer.
Did you know? With Kula, you can access all candidate sourcing metrics in one snapshot. Book a demo!
