Sourcing Tools: What Does the Industry Have to Offer?

It’s pretty safe to say that, for most recruiters, sourcing can be a headache. And that sourcing headache often produces a range of mistakes when it comes to finding top talent.

A big thank you to the Leadership Sponsor of this month’s featured series. Check out TheLadders for help with your recruiting and sourcing.

Recruiters struggle with resume parsing, basic/inadequate searches, submitting the first qualified candidate they find, cutting their sourcing short too early, failing to look at an applicant’s qualities beyond the resume (to name a few).

And probably one of the most important (and critical) errors recruiters make during the sourcing process happens before all of these steps listed above. Many times recruiters can set themselves at a ‘sourcing disadvantage’ from the beginning when they fail to use the right type of tools.

 To find quality candidates, recruiters not only need to use quality sourcing practices but quality sourcing tools. And to help today’s headhunters learn more about what the industry has to offer, below are five of 2014’s current sourcing tools highlighted on Recruiter.com:

1. Graduate Supply Data

Leading real-time business intelligence provider for the talent marketplace, WANTED Analytics, recently released its new graduate candidate supply data. This data offers insight into the potential supply of college students possessing relevant skills for any job in the nation.

Features:

• National, state, and metro-area levels data available, including gender and ethnicity statistics and modeled from college and university reporting

• Helps employers assess talent availability of students who have completed undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs with skills needed by companies

• View hiring demand, gain intelligence, assess talent pools, find sales leads

Companies can also use the graduate supply data to develop programs for attracting college students, collaborate with university internship programs, and/or create training programs for the future workforce.

2. Acrobat Outsourcing App

Acrobat Outsourcing is a staffing organization that specializes in hospitality and related industries. The company recently launched a new application for iPhone designed to simplify the client staffing experience.

Features:

• Mobile app makes data, email addresses, phone numbers, and other info available through a single, mobile interface

• Improves the accuracy of billing procedures

• Ability to send iPhone instant notifications to the accounting department regarding staffing hours and photos of time slips

• Locate nearby Acrobat Outsourcing offices

The new app will soon feature social media capabilities and an app for Android users is coming soon.

3. Process Control Assessment Program

Scientific Management Techniques, Inc. added a new sourcing tool for recruiters specifically in the manufacturing industry. Process Control Assessment Program is a new addition to its hands-on manufacturing skills assessment solutions.

Features:

• Assessment machines replicate real-world conditions in manufacturing industry

• Measure an applicant’s performance in hard skills required for operating and troubleshooting modern manufacturing equipment

• Identifies existing skills sets in the process control elements of pressure, temperature, flow, and level and can be fine-turned by candidates to control a process control loop

• Provides basic and advanced levels of assessment based on the position being staffed and required skill level

4. Ideal Candidate

Ideal Candidate was the first Big Data-powered recruitment tool designed specifically for the sales industry. The sourcing tool uses psychometric assessment and social profiling to help employers find and retain top talent.

Features:

• Psychometric assessment of existing sales employees

• Analysis of team performance for to create a benchmark for future hires

• Compare applicants to benchmark and give each an algorithm-generated candidate ranking

• Reduction in recruitment costs inevitably boosts overall sales revenue

5. Sourcing-as-a-Service

GroupTalent, a hiring platform for technical talent, launched Sourcing-as-a-Service platform to help recruiters source the best and most qualified technical talent. The new platform functions as a matching service by using an algorithm that eliminates recruiter spam and matches opportunities with each candidate’s criteria. This allows recruiters to deliver the best career opportunities on the market for technical talent.

Features:

• Creates a “one-stop shop” where every job opening is available and matched to the most relevant talent

• Matching based on criteria such as desired salary, type of work, company’s business and location

•  Source & Interview: Finds candidates looking for positions, and interviews them just like recruiters – with all the qualifying info.

• Provide Candidate Bios:Recruiters get access to a stream of candidates and can filter on tech stacks, education, and even the candidates’ hiring requirements.

• Candidates Get Pitched: Developers are interested in talking to recruiters who have relevant positions for them, and it only takes 3-5 sentences to get them interested.

• Introductions: When developers are interested, the platform creates introduction calls for both parties to chat and discuss.

The recruitment industry is full of quality sourcing tools and software. Which tools work best for your organization?

A special thank you goes out to TheLadders, a Leadership Sponsor of this month’s featured series on Sourcing Best Practices. Please visit their site to understand how TheLadders can elevate your sourcing and recruitment efforts.