What is an effective candidate sourcing strategy?
Faced with hiring difficulties and increasingly connected candidates, HR firms are forced to set up different sourcing strategies to attract and start candidates and differentiate themselves.
Recruitment has become a real battle. There are more and more the jobs to be filled, suddenly, the number of qualified and available profiles decreases. The choice is rare. It is therefore increasingly important to unravel your candidates well in order to recruit the best profiles .
Thanks to new technologies and other applications, it is easier and easier to set up for recruitment processes and to monitor the sourcing of candidates effectively .
In this article, our experts explain to you what strategies to adopt to get your game out of the game.
The essentials:
- Sourcing is a process that allows you to seek and identify potential candidates meeting a need for recruitment.
- A well -thought -out strategy allows you to gain efficiency, increase your notoriety and build a breeding ground for relevant candidates .
- Your sourcing strategy is based on 4 key steps: definition of your need , identifying communication channels , creating your approach message and the preparation of the qualification interview .
What is sourcing?
Definition of sourcing
In many areas, finding candidates becomes complicated . Indeed, there are more and more companies that are increasingly causing the profiles on the market. Thus a developer can, for example, receive a dozen solicitations per week in his LinkedIn or Mail messaging.
In this context, it is more than ever for recruitment firms to adopt a sourcing strategy . What is sourcing? It is a process that aims to seek and identify potential candidates meeting a need for recruitment.
To be more concrete, sourcing decomposes in 4 steps:
- Definition of need (to understand the ideal profile for the position)
- The candidate's search (mainly on LinkedIn, but not only)
- Prospecting (sending the message best suited to the candidate to maximize his chances of obtaining an answer)
- The qualification (a Screening call to dig the candidate's journey, his ambitions and assess his fit with the offer of his client)
Why is it important to define a sourcing strategy?
Be careful not to get started down in sourcing! Without having established a strategy beforehand, you risk having a very low response rate on the part of the candidates. You will then waste a lot of time and energy for very few results. The objective above all is to favor quality to quantity.
More and more sourcing tools, such as recruitment ATS help, help recruitment firms to seek candidates more quickly and effectively. In addition to a significant saving of time and money , these solutions offer you more qualified profiles and in line with your needs.
Time is the current constraint of recruitment firms. By adopting a good sourcing strategy, you will be sure to save it!
How to define an effective sourcing strategy?
As you can see, the challenges behind a good sourcing strategy are considerable. Here are the four key steps to properly define your sourcing strategy.
Define needs
One of the first challenges of sourcing is to perfectly understand the customer's need.
The objective is to best identify the candidate sought : what are the skills sought, what are the studies most suited to the position, which are the client's competitors where the ideal candidate could work, etc. Ask yourself as much questions as possible to best understand the customer's needs.
This is called in recruitment the definition of the candidate Persona . To define the persona is to try to imagine what the future ideal candidate would look like for your customer. Do not hesitate to be as precise as possible by asking you which motivation levers, his personality, his personal and professional goals ...
Be careful, however, not to personify the ideal candidate too much . Porting the portrait of the candidate Persona must help you better understand the sought after candidate, but should not restrict you in your research. Above all, do not focus on discriminating criteria such as sex, age or the origin of candidates.
The precision the need, the easier the candidates' search.
Search for candidates
We get to the heart of the sourcing strategy! Once the need has been identified, you can get started looking for the ideal candidate.
Today, the main source to find candidates remains Linkedin . It is a very practical tool to use to find candidates directly from their past experiences, studies and skills. Simply enter the relevant keywords in the search bar to find the candidates for your customers.
Do not hesitate to be creative during your prospecting on LinkedIn! Also look at the posts on LinkedIn and comments - it's a good way to identify potential candidates interested in your customers' offers.
But LinkedIn is not the only possible source! There are more and more specialized networks where candidates display their work and portfolios . If you are looking for a designer, take a look at Behance. If your customer needs a developer, look at the projects on GitHub or the posts on Ycombinator. Platforms like Malt are also good ways to quickly find interesting freelance profiles.
You can also look at online cvhetics , such as APEC, Pôle-Emploi, Monster, Indeed, Kickbox Open, Keljob or Cadremploi. To effectively search for candidates, do not forget Boolean search . It is a technique that allows you to search in the databases of candidates who correspond exactly to the recruitment needs. You can also use it on LinkedIn to save time!
Finally, do not forget physical events such as conferences, meet-ups or fairs in schools and universities. These are good ways to easily recruit candidates interested in your customers' offers.
In short, be creative and adapt to the sector in which you recruit.
Also maintain a pool of candidates is the best way to capitalize on the exchanges and research that you have already carried out in the past. This is the strategy that will cost you the cheapest in time, energy and will offer you the best results! Marvin Recruitu allows you to manage your candidates very well well and to create personalized lists in order to set up this strategy.
We advise you to set up cooptation plans. This can be a good way to attract new candidates.
The multidiffusion of announcements on job jobboards does not go exactly into a sourcing strategy since it is the candidate who comes to you and not the other way around. But beware: this strategy can bring you some interesting candidates but is very expensive, without guarantee of recruiting or placing the candidate. In a context of “talent war”, the visibility of ads and reassuring and you may quickly find yourself having to pay in charge to appear at the top of the search results.
For more sourcing techniques, you can read our article for how to suck candidates when you have little or a budget .
Make way for prospecting!
That's it, you have found profiles that interest you! It is now a question of approaching them to make them want to know more about your offer and to exchange with you.
Applicants are much more asked than you think. In order to establish a link with your candidate, it is therefore necessary and compulsory to personalize your message . Otherwise, the latter will fall into oblivion.
Without personalization, your message may lack relevance and do not get an answer .
One of the ways to attract their attention and hope to get a first qualification meeting is to start your message by talking about them . You can thus evoke what interests you in their profile, a specific experience or an original characteristic.
Only then, it is a question of explaining your approach , which you are and why you contact him and not another. This allows you to give him information on the customer and the position and thus give him the matter to think.
If you want to send messages easily and on a large scale, do not hesitate to use automation tools like Walaxy or any LinkedIn Scrapping tool (Phantombuster, Captain Data, etc.). To do this, simply export the list of candidates from your database (or an ATS like that of Marvin Recruit) and integrate it into Walaxy to prospect. You will save a lot of time!
Prepare the qualification interview
At this last step, communication is also very important. Indeed, this interview is surely the first round of a recruitment process. It will therefore be necessary to account for your discussion and your analysis to the other employees involved.
At this stage, we advise you to keep all the data and information of the candidates.
During the qualification interview, prepare in advance a frame of questions you wish to ask him to make sure that you will have all the sufficient information to choose to present it or not to your customers . This may concern:
- Its current missions and achievements which have had a positive impact on the businesses.
- His ambitions for the rest of his career, which he is targeting professionally
- His hardskills : his skills, his training.
It is up to you to also identify the levers that will tip the candidate! Does he look for a post with teleworking? What are its location criteria? Its salary claims? The type of business and the sectors that attract him?
At the end of this interview you must be able to know if the candidate corresponds to your research and whether it is relevant to continue the interviews , or put him in candidates to contact another position. In the positive case, you must then make a summary of the situation:
- How did you find it
- The information communicated and received
- Detail the candidate's skills
This first interview will allow you to understand the course of your candidate and his ambitions.
Organized follow -up is more than recommended at this level. For this, there are many integrated recruitment monitoring solutions in order to keep your processes as best as possible, such as ATS for example.
As you can see, adopting a sourcing strategy offers many advantages.
In addition to allowing you to find qualified profiles , a meticulous strategy allows you to gain efficiency , increase your notoriety and build a pool of relevant candidates who can serve you for next recruitments.
Finally, do not forget that the creation of a recruitment sourcing strategy is an experimental and iterative process . Following the results of your sourcing strategy will allow you to improve it continuously.
Do you want to capitalize on your candidates better? Discover the Marvin Recruité software whose objective is to divide your sourcing time by 2!
