The key role of a recruiter—not least in this context of a talent shortage—is to find the candidates who will help their company grow.
To attract candidates and convert them to fill available positions, their search must be structured and serve a strategy aligned with the company's challenges. In this context, using the right sourcing channels is essential for effective recruitment.
Standardizing your recruitment strategy, reducing time and costs, optimizing your employer brand... so many actions aimed at recruiting the best talents. But it's still necessary to have the candidate pool best suited to each situation and well-constructed.
So, are you ready to explore the world of sourcing and the different methods to conquer the best talents?
Collaborative article written by Basile and Nicoka.
A. What is sourcing in recruitment?
Just as marketing is a customer acquisition strategy, sourcing is a candidate acquisition strategy. It encompasses all actions aimed at accessing your talent pool, identifying potential candidates, and generating targeted applications based on a specific need.
A relevant sourcing strategy can bring you many advantages, in the short and long term:
- Recruit more reliable candidates, reduce turnover, and limit hiring mistakes
- Make savings in time and money through precise target identification and the use of pertinent channels to reach them
- Enrich your candidate pool
- Manage your recruiters' workload
Each job offer can potentially reach a pool of people distinguished into two categories:
- Active candidates: those searching for an opportunity, who will apply spontaneously
- Passive candidates: open to opportunities or not, they will only apply if the offer comes to them
B. How to structure your sourcing strategy in recruitment?
It's a fact: adopting an effective sourcing strategy is essential to recruit the right profiles more quickly. But what is the right method to structure it?
1. Determine the need
The sourcing process is prepared upstream. It must serve a specific need to attract ideal candidates.
For this first step, the recruiter must have a mapping of the company's recruitment challenges and the skills sought. They must gather information allowing them to better identify the need, among others, from employees who expressed the need or consultants depending on the complexity of the position.
2. Identify your target
In a second phase, to properly initiate your sourcing strategy, it's advisable to identify the candidates who will meet your recruitment needs or feed your talent pool. This step is essential to best adapt your approach to the highly sought-after profiles.
Attention, if the search is launched without this preliminary step, your recruiters risk exhausting themselves without achieving results commensurate with their involvement.
Indeed, when working for Airbus in Blagnac, it's better to focus your spending to reach the community of aeronautical engineers in the Southwest region rather than spending broadly to target all French-speaking engineers, from agronomists to IT specialists.
Once this second step is completed, it's time to draft the offer that will attract your potential candidates. As soon as the offer is published, the sourcing phase can begin. But what tools should be mobilized to achieve your objectives?
C. How to optimize your sourcing strategy?
While the adopted sourcing strategy must meet the aspirations, habits, and interests of the targeted candidates, there are nevertheless tools and best practices whose effectiveness is proven to optimize it; regardless of your search.
1. Take the pulse of your employer brand
What image does your company convey? Desirable? Innovative? Modern? Archaic?
Invest in the field, develop your employer brand, and ensure that the best talents want to join your company. It's a long-term investment that serves a double objective: boosting your attractiveness and retaining your employees sustainably.
How? Concrete actions + communication.
Become one of the companies where it's really good to work and let it be known!
Innovation, team-buildings, reducing meeting overload, corporate daycare centers, telecommuting, ecological commitment, intelligent and innovative reflection processes, optimizing employee rights... It all depends on your sector of activity and your company's ability to implement these measures.
In any case, you must do everything to highlight your actions and inspire the most interesting talents, but also to retain your current talents.
Become a reference in your sector of activity
Position your company as an expert in the sector in which you operate. Encourage your peers to participate in trade shows, write opinion pieces and articles, participate in studies; in short, be an integral part of your ecosystem and become a prominent member. This will allow you to be known by all professionals in the field, but also to be seen as an authority and become one of the sector's references, a company to which one is proud to belong.
2. Develop your digital presence
In the internet age, it is essential to care for your digital presence and provide as much information as possible to your potential candidates. Whether it's your company pages on social networks or your career site, the main challenge is the same: to attract your targets.
The career site
The career site is the cradle of your recruitment campaigns. It determines their success and allows them to grow. It serves to attract candidates, inform them about your company culture and its professions. Candidates are increasingly in search of transparency from the companies they apply to; your career site must live up to this requirement. It's an effective channel to promote your culture, showcase your employees and professions, and highlight your accomplishments.
Social networks
Multiply your chances of finding talents by communicating your needs on social networks. Besides the obvious LinkedIn, both a job board and a social network, whether it's Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, they allow you to access recent graduates, people who are not present on job boards, and passive candidates. It's a good way to enhance your employer brand, make your company known in a more informal way than on the career site, and develop your pool of potential candidates.
3. Engage your employees in your recruitment challenges through referral
Everyone has a circle of personal and professional acquaintances. There is therefore a chance that one of your employees knows the new developer who will solve all your problems, or the graphic designer who will revitalize your brand image.
And what if we multiplied these potentials by the number of employees in the company? That's the winning bet of referral!
In 2019, 89% of recruiters declared relying on referral in France... and for good reason: it is THE most efficient sourcing method in terms of ROI.
Calling on your employees' network allows you to: accelerate the recruitment process and reduce its cost, while boosting the employer brand.
So, let all your employees know that you are looking for new talent and list each of the selection criteria to optimize the candidate experience and not choose the wrong talent.
Results in figures:
Obtain more qualified applications
- 19% of referred candidates are recruited thanks to the Basile referral solution
Reduce your turnover and limit hiring mistakes
- 43% of referred candidates stay 3 years in the company, compared to 14% of candidates recruited on a job board (Social Referral report)
Save time
- 80% is the time gain that recruiters estimate on the pre-selection stage thanks to referral (APEC study)
Recruit at lower cost
- Save up to €15,000 compared to traditional recruitment
To learn more about referral, download the 2022 Referral Guide for free.
Info bonus: If your recruitment volume is large, managing an artisanal referral program can be time-consuming. To make life easier for your recruiters, digitize your referral program using a digital solution such as Basile. Basile relieves your recruiters of operational tasks related to the management and animation of your program and guarantees its performance.
4. Explore and develop your pool of potential candidates
There are many tools to source candidates: job boards, school sites, referral, social networks, and company sites in particular. The latter represent an exponential sourcing base that is up to you to develop. Do some research and pin profiles that could be useful to your company, even if you don't need them immediately.
A pool must be alive to be useful: that's why it's necessary to update it regularly. An obsolete pool is useless. Maintaining the pool is the role of the human resources department; it's regular work that pays off in the long term. When a need is expressed, the search must first rely on this pool to identify candidates who meet the required qualifications.
5. Use an ATS to automate and boost your sourcing processes
Whether you use one or more channels to attract candidates, an ATS allows you to centralize all your applications in one place. The benefit? You save time and focus on higher-value actions.
From your ATS you carry out all your actions: writing and multi-posting job offers, receiving applications, email and SMS exchanges, interview reports, evaluations, recruitment tests, sharing candidate files with a client/manager, disqualification...
Your CV database builds up over time. You then capitalize on your sourcing carried out on previous missions by using the criteria-based search engine and automated matching possibilities.
All this is done securely with controlled access, saved data, and automated management of compliance with the protection of individual data.
6. Publish your job offers on job boards and explore CV databases
Publishing your job offers on dedicated sites is the most used sourcing method by recruiters. There are many, generalist or specialized, free or paid.
Publish your offers on LinkedIn, Hellowork, APEC, Indeed, or even Pôle Emploi, navigate in search of specific profiles, explore CV databases, and/or poach employees who occupy the positions that interest you at competitors.
Surf on school websites to target specific junior profiles, in line with the skills you are looking for.
Info bonus:
Save time thanks to your ATS by multi-posting your job offers to avoid having to enter the same job offer several times.
