10 Talent Sourcing Tips for 2023

Talent sourcing is a demanding and complex process. You and your ideal candidates do not have time to waste on inefficient or unattractive strategies.

There’s no denying that the recruiting process keeps a business running. Sourcing qualified talent from a diverse group of prospective candidates is an exciting and challenging opportunity for any leading recruiter or HR professional.

Diverse talent pipelines ensure that your employee turnover is kept at a minimum and qualified candidates have incredible productivity potential. You must consider as many channels and platforms as possible.

We put together ten tips for you to find your perfect candidates. Navigating the talent pool can be tricky, and you need a dynamic talent sourcing process.

1. Establish Your Ideal Candidate Persona

While there are countless talented candidates out there, we recommend you make a detailed and optimized candidate persona for your company and role.

This collaborative effort should involve the department you are hiring for, your hiring managers, and other key stakeholders. You can get incredibly deep with every ideal persona metric, but let’s list the essential ones:

• Position: the fundamental role that your candidate persona will occupy (or already does), such as backend developer, graphic designer, or sales development representative.
• Company: these are the businesses you have identified as employing your candidate persona. It would be best if you had a specific list of businesses whose workforces you have researched well.
• Education: the degrees, qualifications, courses, and diplomas you want your candidate persona to possess.
• Experience: the appropriate number of years your persona has spent in their field.
• Salary Range: negotiation is a big part of any recruitment process. Calculate a salary range for your candidate persona rather than assigning a fixed number.
• Skills: these include the essential aptitudes for the position, like coding languages, SEO, or Adobe Photoshop. With skills you can even go further and include knowing how to analyze competitors backlinks, how to create poster designs, or what programming languages they should be able to use.

Once you have your candidate persona, you can narrow down your intent, channels, and overall recruiting strategy.

2. Create an E-Recruiting Checklist

Considering how many companies today employ e-recruiting, we decided that our platform must provide talent sourcing tools. We also outlined a step-by-step digital recruiting strategy to simplify the entire process.

1. Establish which of your departments require a new job opportunity.
2. Consider your hiring parameters and whether you want to look internally, externally, or a hybrid approach.
3. Formulate and write your job description and design a job posting.
4. Get the green light from leadership before publishing and advertising your job posting.
5. Carefully examine the channels in which you would like to post your ad.
6. Keep a close eye on employee referrals - easily achieved through your applicant tracking system.

3. Make the Most Out of Employee Referrals

Before beginning the external recruitment process, consider your internal one. Your current employees are bound to have expansive networks.

You can create an internal talent acquisition team to examine your existing contacts. No one appreciates your company culture better than your coworkers, and they know what to look for in potential candidates.

Your colleagues can tap into their social networks and quickly find active candidates with experience and skills they can vouch for.

A local hiring process is also a superb way to identify and contact passive candidates. You’re far more likely to get a response from a person you’re acquainted with than cold email sequences.

Building relationships is straightforward when an employee reaches out to ideal candidates they’re already familiar with.

4. Source Untapped Talent by Diversifying Your Candidate Pipeline

The average hiring manager is bound to have their preferred talent source channels. Most will consult their professional network, while a large portion will start with LinkedIn.

Effective talent sourcing considers a broad pool of talent. You’ll find unlikely passive talent opportunities when you get creative with the goal of talent sourcing.

But how would one find best-fit candidates in unfamiliar circles? It all depends on the industry you’re sourcing from.

If you need to staff a startup, you will need to consider a spectrum of candidate experience, including marketing, design, operations, engineering, sales, and recruiting.

5. The Best Social Media Channels and Professional Platforms

One of the most significant benefits of digital recruitment is being spoiled for choice. Numerous websites are brimming with talented and eager candidates.

Social media and candidate-hosting platforms are excellent for talent sourcing and employer branding. While social media platforms are often used for keeping track of friends, they have also been optimized for quick and accurate recruiting.

• LinkedIn: Love or hate it, LinkedIn is the most dynamic and valuable social media platform for digital recruiters. 86% of hirers regard LinkedIn as the ideal recruiting channel, according to a whitepaper by Robert Walters.
• Twitter: You’ll find more than edgy takes and Elon Musk memes on Twitter. The chirping social media platform isn’t apparent as a recruiting resource, but it allows you to reach out to candidates in a more relaxed and informal manner.
• Instagram: This is another dark horse in the digital recruiting world. With more than one billion users, Instagram is brimming with potential candidates. Instagram is best for finding young creatives.
• Facebook: One of the big draws for recruiters regarding this social media platform is its incredible versatility. Facebook is populated with a widely varying set of demographics.
• Indeed: A world-leading job search platform that also happens to be one of the largest. Indeed’s database currently contains almost 90 million CVs.
• Slack: There’s a good chance that you and your team use Slack for daily communication. But did you know that Slack also hosts plenty of open recruiting channels?

6. Develop an Admirable Employer Brand

A strong, impactful, and desirable employer brand can spell the difference between a flow of solid candidate responses and a disappointingly quiet recruiting process.

Candidates won’t want to work at a company with an obscure or negative employer brand, let alone begin the application process.

A good employer brand is one of the most effective tools in your talent sourcing kit. A well-renowned company will pull more candidates than businesses with poor Glassdoor ratings.

On the topic of Glassdoor, it’s vital that you pay close attention to and respond to online reviews of your company. Sites like InHerSight and Glassdoor are commonly held authorities for potential candidates.

Your recruiting teams and HR professionals should respond to these reviews, addressing complaints and reinforcing praise. A human and attentive approach does wonders for your employer branding.

Your employees can also work on candidate engagement by posting and sharing blog and social media posts. The content can range from authentic personal working experiences to the best qualities of your company culture. Also, if you have an enterprise WordPress hosting or another platform, make sure your culture is well presented there because candidates tend to check such things in the social platforms where you are present.

7. Take the Time To Write Personalized Responses

This might be a demanding process if you are dealing with hundreds of leads, but responding to a quality candidate with a personalized email or LinkedIn message is a great way to bolster your reply rates.

You don’t necessarily need to pore through each favored candidate’s social media or LinkedIn profile to establish your common hobbies (although you should if you have time). But showing a human interest and respect for a person gives your recruiting funnel a competitive edge over companies that send automated responses.

At the same time, keep your initial communication relaxed and personable, and try not to oversell. Coming off too strongly can make candidates suspicious of your intentions. You can also briefly mention your company culture and how the candidate would fit into it.

8. Don’t Neglect Your Offline Channels

We might be passionate about digital recruiting channels, but we’d never recommend that you forget your traditional ones.

If you were recruiting before the pandemic began, you probably have a list of networking events, conferences, and other preferred venues. We recommend a varied mixture of external and internal events and conferences.

If your company has the resources available, you can organize events and invite the candidates and colleagues you would like to meet. It’s much easier to engage with candidates on the home ground rather than competing with other companies.

You can also open your company events to other departments and recruiters. In-person meetings create authentic and intimate relationships that are sometimes difficult to formulate online. Keep an e-business card handy at such events to focus your energies on networking and scouting while leaving the data collection and recording job to the business card.

9. Pay Extra Attention to Passive Candidates

Passive candidates are among the trickiest potential hires to reach out to and nurture. If you have experience with passive candidates, then you know how indifferent they can be to your offerings, even if you promise them a superb position and a desirable salary.

Passive candidates often don’t care about recruiting efforts and will happily ignore reams of cold emails and LinkedIn private messages. You need to stand out from the crowd and create an attention-grabbing strategy.

Craft Outstanding and Lucrative Subject Lines

Neglected subject lines are the Achilles’ heel of many cold email strategies. It’s a sad truth that an unappealing subject line will fail many digital recruiters’ otherwise attractive and exciting propositions.

This headline is the first thing your passive candidate will see and needs to pique their interest. A catchy subject line provides an immediate understanding of your offerings and will often decide whether a passive candidate will open or ignore your email.

Avoid Bulk or Automated Emails

This second point relates to our seventh recruiting tip. Passive candidates are unlikely to engage with automated or bulk emails. They need a personalized contact that shows a recruiter has researched them and why they would be a good fit.

Avoid generic (and insincere-sounding) hooks like “I came across your profile and feel you would be a good fit.” Outline which skills, qualities, and other metrics from your candidate persona you identified in a passive candidate.

Make the Whole Process Easy for a Passive Candidate

Even if you manage to win a passive candidate’s attention, it’s unlikely that they will have much spare time or energy to engage with a demanding interview process.

Start small and open a value-driven conversation with a passive candidate, rather than proposing they attempt a trial assignment. You can be a bit more demanding once you have built a rapport and commitment.

10. Nurture Your Passive Candidate Leads

Building from our previous point, we recommend that you keep your passive leads as warm as possible. Once you have built a relationship with a passive candidate, you need to maintain it.

You might find this process demanding, but monthly communication with your passive leads is essential for stocking your recruitment pipeline. Some of the best ways to nurture passive leads include:

• Updating them with company news and developments they might find interesting.
• Commending them on personal or career milestones and achievements.
• Wishing them on their birthdays or anniversaries.
• Sharing relevant resources and tools like courses, articles, and apps.

Nurturing a passive lead involves playing the long game. You’ll need to be a highly empathetic and considerate recruiter, but it will pay off in the long run when a passive candidate begins looking for a new position.

People are more likely to remember and consider those they have existing relationships and have shown a dedication to their success.

Keep Being Creative and Experiment

You have probably gathered that there is no “holy grail” in talent sourcing. You will enjoy a more successful and rewarding recruiting strategy if you combine and employ the ten tips above, but never stop experimenting.

A sincere level of creativity is key to any recruitment strategy. We’re always finding new combinations and approaches, but always put the candidate and their needs first.

We hope you find your next candidate soon. In the meantime, we will make sure to update this list when we find new and exciting techniques.

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