Talent Sourcing 101: How to Source Top Talent and Boost your Recruitment?

It’s the era of relentless competition and recruitment has become a race given the intense demand for quality talent. Modern recruiters face constant heat due to talent discovery and hiring challenges. However, every battle can be won with the right strategy and the hiring battle starts with sourcing. Keeping your talent pipelines filled with quality talent helps you scale up smoothly as you need to hire aggressively while growing. In this blog, we will discuss strategies that will push you to ace talent sourcing and supercharge your recruitment.

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Remember the last time you were almost sure about getting a candidate onboard and while you were about to confirm, they accepted another offer? Well, you’re not alone – this has become a norm in this candidate-driven economy. It’s now vital to be ready for every possible scenario as a recruiter. 80% of the organizations engage in talent sourcing proactively. You clearly cannot wait for the requirements to arise to source candidates.

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The other side of the coin is, that you need to learn, experiment and pivot your talent sourcing strategies. To find and recruit the top “creamy layer” candidates, just sourcing active candidates through job boards isn’t enough. So how do you find out the best talent? How do you engage with them? How do you make sure you have plenty of great options while hiring? Let’s dive straight into all of this, and more.

What is Talent Sourcing?

Talent sourcing involves identifying, connecting and engaging with your target talent pools of the best possible candidates. The objective of sourcing is to keep your talent pipelines filled so that you can hire people fast and at scale. The recruitment journey starts with sourcing and hence the quality of candidates an organization hires depends on talent sourcing.

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While sourcing talent is just about getting the right candidates to your recruitment pipeline, the dynamics have now changed. How? A survey suggests that over 73% of all the candidates are passive job seekers, which means they don’t bother applying to jobs but would be open to switching in case of better opportunities. So talent sourcing is all about discovering such candidates and engaging with them.

It should also be kept in mind that for successfully filling up your candidate pipeline and hiring quality talent, you need to source candidates at scale. 

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But talent sourcing eats up a lot of time - the most scarce resource you have as a modern recruiter. That’s where sourcing strategies and automation come into the picture. With a few systems and practices in place, you’ll be all set to source like a pro.

What are the Strategies to Source the Right Talent?

Before we get started with the strategies, let’s take a look at what halts candidate sourcing. We researched and curated a list of top struggles faced commonly by recruiters:

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• Fewer applicants to a job posting

• Unqualified or under-skilled candidates

• Competitors closing candidates in your pipeline

• Continuously maintaining the recruitment pipeline

• Too much investment of time in sourcing leaves less time for recruitment 

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Now it’s time to address the elephant in the room – how can you overcome these sourcing struggles? Let’s get started with 8 tried and tested strategies to help you solve all of these issues and more.

1. Assign Sourcing and Recruiting to Different People

Executives and HR directors need to understand that recruitment and sourcing need different skillsets. So it’s crucial to have dedicated professionals doing either one of them. Sourcing candidates is finding, connecting and engaging with relevant candidates who seem to fit in an open role. On the other hand, recruitment follows the candidate pipeline – once someone is interested in the position, they get into the recruitment phase.

In exceptional cases with a very small team, say less than 4-5 recruiters – you can predefine the timelines and framework of sourcing and recruitment to make things easier.

2. Analyze the Hard Requirements 

It’s always recommended to understand the job role requirements from vertical heads and executives (if possible) before sourcing candidates. Especially the hard skills and expected experience need to be analyzed while you’re making a decision.

To accomplish this, recruiters should be in constant touch with the vertical leads and domain experts. For example - if you’re hiring a Growth Marketing Manager, you should ask the VP of marketing or CMO for input. Note that the more questions you ask in case of doubts, the more efficient your sourcing becomes and positive results follow.

3. Maintain Your Talent Sourcing Pipeline

Just sourcing candidates consistently isn’t enough, you need to create and maintain your talent pipeline. It helps you keep track of each candidate – their employment status, contact details and engagement insights.

A sourcing pipeline helps you save a lot of time, prevents multiple outreach attempts for the same candidate and makes sure no candidate is left out.

4. Begin Sourcing Candidates from Your ATS

Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) has those candidates who had applied for a job at your place earlier but couldn’t get selected. Around 250 resumes are uploaded for each job role on average. And 5-6 people get the final interview. Intense shortlisting happens at each stage of recruitment leaving behind qualified candidates for numerous reasons.

Filter among these talent pools – chances are high that by now, they would have upskilled and gained more experience. These candidates can be real gold and you get them without any extra effort. 

5. Don’t Stop Sourcing

A large number of recruiters often end up doing this mistake. They stop looking out for candidates once all the roles are filled. While filling all the available roles is definitely an achievement, you should keep looking out for talented candidates – identify them, engage and network to form a relationship. 

Sourcing should ideally never stop because people keep quitting and you are going to hire anyways in the future. Knowing your organization’s long-term goals will help you foresee the growth and requirements for talent acquisition. 

6. Focus on Your Employer Brand

Recruitment has now become more of marketing. We aren’t claiming this in the air – 86% of recruiters said this in a survey. Additionally, employer branding improves the top 3 recruitment aspects – the quality of hiring, time taken and cost of hiring.

An established employer brand can attract even the top talent from around the world. Ever wondered why people want to work for FAANG companies - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google? Because besides being the best company in the world, they have built a strong employer brand.
To get started, you can focus on improving your compensation, additional perks, work environment and culture. Ensuring a great career trajectory for your employees would help too.

7. Keep an Eye on Sourcing and Recruitment Performance 

A number of metrics need to be tracked and analyzed for improving your talent sourcing process. Find out:

• Which outreach approach suits you the best?
• The topmost sourcing platforms
• Which channel of communication is preferred most by candidates?
• How long should you ideally engage with a candidate?
• Did the passively sourced candidates display better expertise than others during an interview? 

Analyzing more of such metrics would help you enhance your sourcing with every iteration. Data-driven insights always help to save time and resources while hunting for the best talent.

8. Leverage Talent Sourcing Automation

If you have been in the recruitment space for more than a year, you would know – sourcing candidates, maintaining talent pipelines, engaging with hundreds of them and then moving on to the critical recruitment journey, is more than hectic.

But now you don’t need to do it all manually. Just opt for a sourcing automation tool and get rid of hefty repeated tasks like pipeline management, syncing your talent pipeline with ATS, outreaching, candidate engagement and nurturing. 

Automation in talent sourcing not only saves your time but also makes your sourcing more efficient and hiring more fruitful. You get more time to pursue the critical and productive recruitment tasks rather than database maintenance and updating.

Different Methods of Sourcing Talent

We analyzed the top sourcing strategies that you can execute to source effectively and grow your talent pipeline. But how to execute them? Let’s find out the various methods to perform talent sourcing. And our aim is not just to source talent, but to source top talent in a shorter period of time with the least amount of hassle.

#1 Popular Job Boards 

Posting your jobs on various online platforms is the primary method of sourcing talent for the majority of the organizations. And it works pretty well because of the high popularity of numerous job posting websites and professional networking platforms.

Posting on job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, Jobs2career, LinkedIn, Naukri.com, AngelList and more attracts enough candidates and gives you a wide range of options to select from.

Additionally, to display your job openings to the most relevant audience (potential candidates) – you can leverage paid ads on these platforms too.

Job boards allow you to be present in front of numerous people as an employer. However, they only help you get candidates looking actively for jobs.

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#2 Social Media Platforms & Communities

4.48 billion people use social media worldwide. Sourcing candidates from social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have become mainstream for successful recruiters. Identifying and connecting with talented individuals is not only easy on these platforms, but also gives you a vital insight into their personal and professional lives.

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When it comes to reaching more people, job posts on social media obviously get more reach as compared to job sites, hence getting more interested and skilled candidates to apply. According to Jobcast, 73% of organizations have successfully hired through social media and 93% of companies use LinkedIn for recruiting.

Niche communities like that on Facebook groups, Slack and Discord channels are also great sources of proactive talent.

#3 Employee Referrals 

Hiring quality candidates is directly dependent on your network which can be exceptionally widened if you add up all your employees’ connections. Recruitment would be a lot easier and fast if you leverage your employees’ connections.

Reward your employees for successful referral conversions and they will be even more motivated to get the right people on the fence. 

#4 Passive Sourcing

Take the control to your hands if you want to source the best possible candidates for your organization. Identify and reach out to talented prospects and find out if they are interested in joining you. Once they agree and seem fit for the role, you can start the recruitment process.

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Research shows that passive candidates are 120% more likely to make an impact on your organization through their work. It is clear that the most successful hires are through passive sourcing. The reason is simple. Most talented and experienced candidates won’t bother applying to jobs because they are employed and numerous recruiters are already reaching out to them.

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What are the Best Practices in Talent Sourcing?

Here are the best practices you should keep in mind while identifying, connecting and engaging with quality talent:

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1. Spend enough time understanding the job requirements and drafting a description

2. Learn boolean search for searching effectively on Google and LinkedIn

3. Put attention to detail while evaluating prospects’ profiles

4. Browse diverse talent pools for discovering unspotted talent

5. Ensure extra focus on communication and relationship building

6. Automate the mundane tasks of managing your talent and recruitment pipelines

Top 5 Tools that Help in Talent Sourcing

Now that you know about top talent sourcing strategies, sourcing methods and best practices to follow – it’s high time you learn how to scale up your sourcing campaigns with automation. How do you do that? Various talent sourcing tools are available in the market today that help you source quality talent quickly and conveniently. 

Let’s take a quick look at the top 5 talent sourcing tools and how do they help you in sourcing effectively:

1. NurtureBox

NurtureBox enables talent sourcing at scale through impactful automation, so you can manage your entire sourcing pipeline through a single window and focus on the more intense tasks like interviewing and shortlisting in interactions.

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Our Chrome extension helps you:

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• Integrate your existing ATS to NurtureBox using the Recruitee plugin
• Automate personalised outreach
• Engage with candidates across multiple channels - LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Email
• Automated sourcing pipeline management 
• Enable email nurturing campaigns with the Lemlist plugin
• Track and analyze your performance insights to improve your sourcing with every iteration.

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2. Connectifier

Connectifier is also a Chrome extension that connects a huge database to help you research candidates. The ‘auto-search’ option allows recruiters to discover more details about candidates including their contact numbers, email addresses and more.

3. Archively

Archively is a tool that captures prospect information from any page on any site. The tool first gathers relevant data and then creates their profile on Archively. Users can also organize candidates to share talent pipelines with their teams.

4. Hunter

Hunter is a talent recruitment solution that helps users identify suitable candidates, monitor application progress and manage administrative tasks. 

5. TalentBin

This tool helps you collect all the candidate data in one go. The aggregated information available in TalentBin includes social profiles, and GitHub (if applicable). It also enables sync with your ATS and makes it accessible to search in whichever platform you are sourcing talent.

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Conclusion

Talent sourcing has evolved rapidly over the past decade. From newspaper ads to specialised online job posting sites and now social media candidate sourcing, recruiters have to continuously unlearn and learn new strategies for onboarding the right talent. 

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If you are worried about recruiting quality talent fast, fret not. NurtureBox makes it easier for recruiting teams to source talent at scale. Our one-stop sourcing solution tool allows you to add target prospects to your campaigns, automate your outreach and engage with them effectively. To help you boost your talent sourcing, NurtureBox makes all the tools you need for sourcing and recruitment accessible through a single window. From contact details finding tools like SignalHire to ATS integration with Recruitee and email nurturing campaigns using Lemlist, and more – we serve the most productive plugins and integrations to make your recruitment seamless.

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