Do you know candidate sourcing strategies that can work without spending any extra bucks?
Or do you ever feel need to improve your candidate sourcing strategies for attracting quality talent?
Let’s get down to 6 top sourcing strategies for attracting right candidates.
1. Post Jobs To Free Job Boards
Who wouldn’t like free stuff? Don’t ignore the power of job boards that offer free resumes. We tend to assume that the job boards that offer free job posting will not have good candidates to offer. Guess what, you could be wrong.
LinkedIn offers one free job posting. Indeed, in most countries offer free job posting.
Job boards that mostly target local jobs also offer free job posting. And hence many a times they have the candidates that you may not find on other platforms.
You may refer to our compiled list of free job posting sites. CVViZ post jobs to these free job boards with one submission.
2. Use Social Media for Candidate Sourcing
Remember old days when Times – the news paper used to have 16 page supplement on job opportunities! Do you see it now? May be a page somewhere.
Reason is simple; it is because audience has shifted to different medium. And it is social media. As per statista.com, daily social media usage of global internet users amounted to 135 minutes per day.
Use social media to your advantage. Post jobs on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can also focus on specialized job boards like Stack Overflow, MediaBistro, Angel.co, etc.
Let the word out. And don’t restrict posting jobs on social media to yourself. Let everyone in your team and employees of your organization help you with spreading the word. Using social media is proving to be one of the best candidate sourcing strategies.
3. Write Killer Job Descriptions to Attract Top Talent
If candidate sourcing is a marketing job, then job description is your sales pitch. Therefore, you must get it right! Take job descriptions seriously. Know how to write good job description.
Your job description should be neat and clear. Avoid jargons. No cliche.
What sounds more interesting –
Work with the best in the industry.
OR
Work with MIT, Harvard, Google, Apple alumni.
- Describe the role well enough to attract right candidates. Good candidates always pay attention to their career growth. Make sure, your job description helps them understand their career path in the organization.
4. Personalized Communication to Engage Top Candidates
Recruiting emails are almost dead. When was the last time you got a reply to a cold job opportunity email? Unless you are Apple, Google, it is very unlikely you are going to get quick responses from good candidates.
Make sure when you come across good resume, you take more effort to send personalized communication. Take more effort to know about such candidates by leaning more about their social presence, work contributions. Your email should build relationship with candidate.
Which email stands a better chance?
“We have this great opportunity for you. If you are interested please apply here.”
OR
“We have come across your profile. We felt your contribution in the area of hedge funds is impressive. Your views on Convertible Arbitrage were compelling. We believe, you could be a great fit to our organization. How about we discuss the opportunity?”
Yes. It takes efforts! However, there are many upcoming recruitment softwares that can automate such tasks for you.
5. Employee Referral to Reach to Probable Candidates
There are some things that never go wrong or out of fashion. Employee Referral has been always recruiters’ and organization’s favorite. It has seen as the most productive and most cost effective candidate sourcing strategies to hire top talent. Therefore, every organization must have an employee referral program.
Your employees already have the right network of friends and colleagues. Let’s say you want to expand your existing team of Hadoop Engineers. Who do you think will have the best and quick connect to your probable future Hadoop engineers than your existing employees?
Candidates hired as part of employee referral tend to stay longer with the firm.
Organizations encourage employee referral programs, but they don’t focus on employee referral engagements. Companies should introduce gamification approach in order to improve their referral programs. Gamification can encourage employees to refer more and better candidates. Your employees should be brand ambassadors of your company.
6. Career page – Branding Page
Make no mistake. Career page on your website is your branding page. Hence, make sure you give special attention to your career page.
Add video testimonials of your employees. Emphasize your recent achievements. Describe your work culture.
Most importantly, a rather unknown fact, that, many leading job boards could be crawling jobs on your career page. It means all your current jobs are also displayed on such job boards. This also improves your web presence and draws more crowd to your career page. Therefore, your career page must be updated regularly (read automatically).
Your career page should convert such leads into qualified leads.
Google for jobs – For Candidate Sourcing
Google has introduced Google for jobs couple of years ago and now mostly available across the world. Google for jobs has made it very easy for candidates to search for jobs. Now, instead of searching jobs on multiple job boards or career pages of different companies, candidates can simply search for jobs on google.
just like any other google search. How cool is that? Google achieves this by using NLP, machine learning and various integrations with job boards. We see, in future, most of the candidates would be looking for job opportunities using google search.
This simply means that when candidates google for job opportunities, job positions from your companies must appear in the search. So, What you need to do for that?
You just need to have all active jobs on your career page in certain formats. You can read more about this here. If job openings from your companies appear in the search, active candidates that are looking for change in the job, can view and apply for job openings in your company. Practically, you can source many candidates without spending any penny!
Final Thoughts on Candidate Sourcing Strategies
Candidate sourcing is a combo job of marketing and sales. If you do it right you are going to draw attention of right talent.
If you have observed, all above candidate sourcing strategies don’t cost you any extra money. You just need to tweak your existing recruiting strategies for candidate sourcing. You should use recruitment technology such as AI resume screening, smart ATS to deal with high volume of candidates applications.
