Given the lack of skilled and talented workers, employers are no longer in a position to pick and choose top choice candidates from a surplus of talent. Today’s job market belongs to the tech-savvy and talented candidate. This is making it increasingly difficult for recruiters to fill vacancies faster. Employers are compelled to rethink their recruitment strategies and can no longer afford to sit back and wait for job applications to pour in. They have to be proactive at sourcing talent.
What is Active Sourcing?
Active sourcing essentially means identifying, attracting, and engaging top industry talent to build a talent pipeline ahead of time. This talent pipeline can then be nurtured and tapped when vacancies arise. The term, “active sourcing” includes all the recruitment steps taken to connect with and convince desired candidates of the value of a job offer.
How Active Sourcing Works
Regardless of the employment status of a candidate, whether studying or passive, employers are making contacts and maintaining skilled candidates in their talent pools for filling future openings. This requires recruiters to build relationships and maintain ties with potential employees at job fairs, HR seminars, university programs, and networking events. Active search recruitment helps in creating a pool of highly qualified, pre-screened candidates which, in turn, makes it much easier to fill vacancies quickly when openings are created.
Social networking is also becoming a preferred option for modern day recruiters. With billions of active users, social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and XING offer a perfect platform to recruiters for connecting and communicating with A+ players.
Signs Your Recruitment Approach is Passive
- You are posting jobs on job boards and social channels and waiting for the applications to flow in.
- You are spending hours every day scanning through applications trying to filter relevant profiles.
- You have no time for active search recruitment and so you are unable to build your talent pipeline.
- You tweet an opening once and decide it’s not working if you don’t receive a good response.
- Your interested candidates are simply sitting in your database as you continue to add more.
A passive recruitment strategy will never help you hit your hiring goals. While you will always be hiring the best candidates out of those who saw your job ads, you may not be hiring the best talent available on the market.
Advantages of Active Recruitment
Active recruitment is a progressive and proactive recruiting approach that offers the following benefits:
- Active sourcing requires recruiters to nurture and foster their talent pipeline. This reduces the time-to-hire by 50%.
- Active sourcing increases the interview success rate by 7 times since recruiters have already developed a meaningful relationship with potential employees.
- While active sourcing does require that extra effort initially, it eventually pays off by lowering your cost per hire by 10 to 15 percent and increases your recruitment ROI significantly.
- Active sourcing minimizes the disruption in business operations created by unexpected vacancies and helps avoid revenue loss caused by declines in work quality and customer service.
- Building purposive relationships with potential employees in advance helps in filling roles faster.
3 Tips to Implement Active sourcing
If you want to implement active sourcing in your organization, then you need to overhaul your recruitment process and include the following 3 steps:
Renovate the Recruiter’s Role
Skilled candidates don’t want to work for a job, they want to work for a company that offers a great work environment, a positive culture, and has a vision that aligns with their personal goals. So every recruiter that is actively sourcing candidates must convey what’s in store for them. This can be done by being active on social platforms, going creative with job adverts, and tapping the social networks of talented employees within the company.
Break Down Established Processes
All the manual, tedious, and time-consuming recruitment tasks must be automated so recruiters can stay focused on building relationships, engaging potential employees and maintaining communication consistently. This may require recruiters to deploy HR tech like an applicant tracking system which is capable of streamlining every step of the recruitment process.
Redefine Performance Benchmarks
Active sourcing also requires that recruiters shift their focus from the number of applications received and interviews conducted to increasing the quantity and quality of the talent pool. And if you want that your talent pool thrives and brings you sustainable recruiting success, then use automation to your advantage.
Get started with Jobsoid’s free trial today and take your active sourcing efforts to the next level with automated job postings, interview management, candidate screenings, engagement emails and accurate reports.
