3 Simple Yet Effective Ways Hiring Managers can Ace Candidate Sourcing in 2022
As a hiring manager, it is your first and foremost responsibility to ensure that your company attracts and retains the best talent in the market. That’s the only thing that will truly get you growth and success in the long run.
However, finding the right candidates for your job openings is now more complicated than it ever has been. This is true because talent shortages have risen to historic levels in the US, with nearly 69% of companies having difficulty filling jobs – the highest in more than a decade.
In these highly competitive times, if you want to snag the best recruits, you need to place a lot of emphasis on choosing the proper channels and techniques for sourcing candidates. That’s because sourced candidates are twice as efficient as candidates who apply.
Keep reading to look at a few simple yet effective ways HR managers and talent acquisition leaders can recruit high-quality individuals by acing candidate sourcing in 2022.
1. Leverage Social Media Channels
A recent survey conducted by LinkedIn revealed that nearly 49% of professionals are following companies in their respective niches today on social networking sites to keep tabs on their recruitment needs and hiring process.
This implies that if you want to cast a wide net to attract more candidates and get your company greater exposure, you’ve got to leverage social media channels for sourcing.
Dell is one company that has achieved positive results with a social media-backed recruitment strategy. The main focus of this multinational giant’s early sourcing efforts was to make its presence felt where its target candidates were spending most of their time – on social media channels. However, HR managers at Dell had no fundamental approach in mind and were following a spray-and-pray model.
In time, upper management at the company realized that they needed to leverage resources in their core markets to create localized content that would not only resonate with but also direct good candidates toward them. Hence, the company decided to make amends to its strategy.
For instance, to attract candidates in the Brazilian market, leaders at Dell piloted a local content strategy in Latin America (LATAM) that mirrored their global content strategy. With this, they empowered social media leads in each country to “tropicalize” the content and create valuable posts that would position the company as a great place to work in their specific market.
By dedicating nearly 25-50% of their time on social media channels, Dell’s local recruiters could increase Brazil’s job page traffic by 1,661% compared to the year before. The company’s source of hire for social media also increased from 3% to 8% in LATAM since implementing this new strategy.
Dell is just one company that could quickly achieve positive hiring results with social media sourcing. While McDonald’s uses Snapchat to inform their candidates about new open positions, Amazon took its social media sourcing strategy to a whole new level by publishing their job advertisements on Tinder.
HR managers can choose from an array of social networking sites to source candidates today, some of which include:
- Job board
- Snapchat
The key to sourcing good candidates with this strategy lies in choosing the right platforms to build strong relationships with potential hires and increasing your brand’s overall visibility in doing so.
2. Utilize Talent Rediscovery Techniques
Hiring managers often collect hundreds of resumes for a given job description. Only a tiny fraction of these applications are shortlisted, while the rest are stored in their databases.
Most of us routinely tell the candidates that are not selected that we will keep their information on file for the future. However, we barely ever get a chance to check our existing databases. It’s often quite daunting to sift through the older resumes and match them against the open positions.
Most talent acquisition leaders already have access to a treasure trove of valuable resources in their applicant tracking systems (ATS) but are stuck without a way to retrieve that information.
The secret here is talent rediscovery! Using Artificial Intelligence for talent rediscovery can automatically sort through the previous resumes in your ATS and shortlist prospective candidates that will be ideal for the positions you currently have openings for.
Lowe’s has already seen positive results for its high-volume recruiting requirements with this particular approach.
Only a few years ago, the retail giant was aiming to hire over 60,000 seasonal associates in a mere span of 90 days. They wanted to retain their existing ATS, which was housing over 4 million candidate applications at the time. This meant searching for both existing and new talent would be slow and erroneous due to the large dataset size.
That’s when they decided to partner with an AI automation, and talent intelligence platform whose advanced search functionality helped them quickly identify over 750,000 qualified candidates with minimum manual refinement.
This is only one example of how recruiters can efficiently source more job candidates through means of talent rediscovery by simply automating, being efficient, and doing something with that goldmine of resumes already existing within their database.
3. Collect Referrals from Existing Employees at Your Company
One recent report published by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that a staggering 96% of organizations with 10,000 employees or more—and 80% of those with fewer than 100 workers—say employee referrals are their number one source for finding new talent.
These referrals can have a great conversion rate, and they may even stay longer at your company. However, even though a lot of evidence has consistently been mounting to show that employee referrals improve retention rates and quality-of-hire while lowering recruiting costs, this is one sourcing strategy that remains underutilized to this day.
Suppose you want your sourcing strategy to truly bear the results you have in mind for your teams. In that case, you need to think about ways to garner active participation from your employees and maximize referrals of any passive or active job seekers they know of. Some of the ways you can do just this include:
- Make sure your referral scheme is easy to understand, and the rules are transparent.
- Show company-wide recognition to employees who refer good potential hires from their personal and professional network, active or passive candidates.
- Try to figure out what type of rewards act as the best motivators for your employees and design your referral program around those.
An effective referral program is the first step that will ensure success for your company in the long run because a brand can only be as good as the people that make it. Your employees are your company’s voice; take suggestions from them often.
Learn More About Where to Source Qualified Candidates
If you’re still struggling with finding qualified candidates, you don’t have to do it on your own. Recruiter.com is here to help you.
We have experience sourcing candidates on job boards, using AI tools, and helping recruiters find candidates for a specific job posting.
To know more about candidate sourcing, selection, and onboarding best practices, and learn how to optimize your hiring process, get in touch with us at Recruiter.com.
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