August 22, 2022
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A number of metrics need to be tracked and analyzed for improving your talent sourcing process. Find out:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are the best practices you should keep in mind while identifying, connecting and engaging with quality talent:
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:
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.
Our Chrome extension helps you:
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.
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.
Hunter is a talent recruitment solution that helps users identify suitable candidates, monitor application progress and manage administrative tasks.
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.
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.
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.
Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
Requirements
Soft Skills
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:
Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.
Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.
Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.
Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.
Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?
Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
