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Best Practices
With that in mind, we've put together the 10 most important best practices to help you identify
and approach talent on any medium you choose and make sourcing candidates something you
excel at.
1. Differentiate between sourcing candidates and recruiting
If you want a high performing sourcing team you need to clarify their responsibilities from the
outset. You need to be crystal clear on what tasks your sourcers handle, and where they handover
candidates to recruiters.
Typically:
Sourcers: find and qualify new candidates (i.e. verify their interest).
Recruiters: handle the process from when a candidate is deemed interested or qualified, right
through to the moment that they're hired.
In many organizations though, this clear delineation of responsibility is lacking. There are often
areas of confusion:
Do your sourcers focus all their time on finding the candidates that aren't applying, or do you also
ask them to write and post job ads?
Once they've found candidates, is it their job to send the initial outreach and qualify people, or is
this a recruiter responsibility?
You might think the answers to these questions are pretty obvious. If that's the case then great, it
sounds like you have a well-organized sourcing process!
If you think your company could be muddled over where sourcing ends and recruiting starts, then
it's worth revisiting the issue and clearly defining job roles to encourage your team to take
ownership of their respective pieces of the process.
Even if you personally run the whole process from search to offer acceptance, or you have a team
of full-cycle recruiters, creating a clear delineation between sourcing and recruiting helps you
measure performance far more effectively and ensures that nothing slips through the gaps (more
on this later).
If you don't think before you act, you're asking for trouble. When you're sourcing, if you don't
work out exactly who you're looking for before you start, you'll waste time and resources
throwing different searches against the wall and seeing what sticks!
It's easy to throw together a few keywords and hit 'search', if you want success sourcing
candidates though, invest 20-30 minutes in planning your search.
Before you start a new search, you should make sure that you understand every inch of the job
requirements. If possible, have a quick chat with the relevant hiring manager to make sure you're
on the same page.
You also need to understand if hiring managers would consider 'step up' or 'stretch' candidates.
These are people that might not currently be working at the level you're hiring for, but exhibit
capabilities that suggest they could step up and perform at a higher level.
This persona is formed by defining the characteristics, skills and traits that make up your perfect
hire. For example, in a sales rep this could be 3+ years experience, ambition and a willingness to
do whatever it takes to close the deal.
Here's a persona that we made for a junior marketing role. (You don't have to create something as
interactive as this, but it's key to know who you're really looking for)
The persona you create should guide your search and help you target candidates that are a good
fit for your company.
You can find more information on candidate personas and their importance, (as well as a
complete guide to building your own), in this post.
Frustratingly, every company under the sun seems to have different titles for the same role! When
you're running a new search you need to make sure you've taken all possible titles into account
before you start.
(Remember, if you're considering stretch candidates, you'll need to take their typical job titles into
effect too!)
Choose the titles, skills, experience, locations and terms to include (or exclude) in your search
string.
It's pretty likely that your early searches will provide additional relevant titles, phrases and terms
that you can add to cast your net a little wider.
From here on out it's a question of optimisation. Add relevant people you find to your CRM,
spreadsheet or LinkedIn project and modify your search terms to try and find additional new
candidates.
3. Start your search with your database
"If you have access to an ATS or internal resume database – it’s specifically designed to store and
retrieve resumes, and probably has more local and more qualified candidates than the Internet,
and might actually have a better search interface enabling more precise searching to find more of
the right people more quickly.
To top it off, your ATS/CRM is filled with people that have already expressed interest in your
company (at some point in time) and with candidates that you or other sourcers/recruiters found
elsewhere and entered in! - Glen Cathey
This is a long quote, but it's such an important (and continually ignored) lesson that I didn't want
to leave any of it out.
Every company has a largely untapped resource that can be hugely valuable for sourcers: their
database of resumes and previous applicants.
The average corporate role has 250 applicants. You're likely to hire 1 candidate, which leaves 249
unsuccessful applicants. Many of these will be relevant for other open positions or future roles,
but this talent goldmine is often ignored.
Remember - the work to find and engage these candidates has already been done!
You’ve already invested significant resources in building your employer brand and getting these
candidates to apply to your company in the first place, not to mention the recruiter time spent
interviewing and filtering them – you may as well try to make use of them!
You'll also find that if you're successful in sourcing candidates from your database, you can
significantly reduce time to hire and cost, (you have the candidates on file already!)
It tends to just be recruiters and active candidates that agonise over the intricate details of their
LinkedIn profile and resume.
The quality coders, marketers and sales reps that you're looking for usually don't have the time
(or inclination) to constantly update their social profiles with all the skills they're learning.
Even people that are actively looking, and are regularly updating their resume may well forget to
list relevant skills. Writing a resume is hard. Forgetting stuff is not!
Keep all of this in mind when you're sourcing and reviewing new candidates. Candidates are not
professional resume writers, and we shouldn't expect them to be.
If you're looking for passive candidates, don't be surprised to see LinkedIn information that's
heavily out of date. These candidates aren't actively looking for new work, so they have no
motivation to update their profile and list all their skills and experience.
Fortunately, you can use your own knowledge and experience to glean insights from the social
profiles of passive candidates.
From your experience you know that typical VP Sales candidates with 5 years experience have
certain skills. While candidate x that you have just found doesn't list these skills in her profile, it's
likely that she would have all (or at least some) of them, and that she would be a good fit for your
role.
5. Go beyond basic searches
If you rely on simple search strings (e.g. job title, skills) for the bulk of your candidate sourcing,
then you'll quickly find that you're ending up with the same talent as everyone else!
You need to go beyond search terms like "java" and "lead developer" to find the pockets of
hidden candidates that no one else is looking for.
Move away from buzzwords and towards semantic search terms that signify a candidate's
responsibilities (i.e. what they actually do in their job). Examples of these terms could include:
manage, design, create.
If you couple these "responsibility" terms with more basic keywords you should be able to
uncover the candidates that aren't besieged by other recruiters and _are _far more capable.
No matter how good the first few candidates you find are, can you really be certain that they are
the best people for the job?
As a sourcer, you get the enviable task of being one of the main arbiters of quality when it comes
to the new people joining your company. It's your responsibility to make sure that the people your
submitting are up to scratch!
So...
Don't just submit the first few candidates that you speak to! Make sure you speak to 10-20
candidates before you select your favourites. This dramatically increases the chance of you
finding someone who is a great fit and will ensure you keep your hiring manager happy!
It sounds counterintuitive, but the best sourcing operations are the ones that never stop, the ones
that run continuously.
It means that your sourcers are always on the lookout for new candidates that match your
candidate personas, culture and future hiring plans.
You might not have any open roles right now, but adding relevant candidates to a pipeline is one
of the best ways to make sure that you always have a pool of high quality talent that you can dip
into when you have a role to fill.
What's the best way to do this?
You're always going to encounter candidates that are interested, but not ready to move,
candidates who need a few years more experience, candidates that you think are great but won't
reply to your messages...
Instead of moving on, add these people to your pipeline and make a concerted effort to build a
relationship. Get this right and you'll always have plenty of people to choose from whenever
there’s a position to fill, and you’ll never have to settle for second best.
No technology can transform a lazy sourcer, but getting the right tech stack in place can make
lightyears of difference to your productivity.
Here's how technology can help you at each stage of the sourcing process:
i) Finding candidates
When it comes to identifying the right talent, the platform you use depends largely on the role
that you're trying to fill. Sourcing truck drivers? Head over to Indeed. Looking for sales
reps? LinkedIncould be your answer.
Resume databases get a pretty bad rep nowadays, but for certain roles they can be a great
resource of candidates.
After you've found the right candidate, you need some way of recording their profile. There are
more than a few browser extensions that will help you collect candidates on the move - here's a
pretty extensive list if you aren't already set here.
Spreadsheets are great for accounting, but they can be pretty limiting for sourcing candidates.
You have to manually update everything, you don’t get any insight into candidate relationships
and you have to use them in conjunction with other tools (email etc) so you’re always jumping
around.
Engaging the candidates that you've found is the most overlooked part of the sourcing process.
There is so much public data on people nowadays that _finding _someone is often the easy part -
it's getting people to respond that's tricky!
If you want to improve your reply rate, you need to get data on the kinds of messages that are
actually effective and find ways of testing new templates in a systematic way.
We recommend:
Email tracking (see when your emails are opened and clicked) - Mailtrack
Template analytics (see which templates get the most responses) - Yesware
Drip campaigns (the ability to automate your follow up emails) - Outreach
If you're bored of using multiple tools for sourcing candidates, take a look at Beamery. Our
software takes care of everything we've mentioned in this entire sourcing technology section!
(Please forgive our Lord of the Rings reference!)
Everyone has an idea of what successful sourcing entails, but if you're not tracking the best
sourcing metrics, then you don't know whether you're performing as well as you could be or not.
Traditional recruiting metrics don't give you the level of insight into the sourcing process that you
need. If you want to understand how you're _really _performing, try tracking these 3 sourcing
metrics:
Superstar sales reps could be lurking on LinkedIn, top designers on Dribbble. You might find that
all of your best technical candidates come from attending meetups.
If you can build up a clear picture of where top talent is hiding, then you can optimise where your
team spend their time and resources.
A slight alteration on the classic ATS time-to-hire metric, tracking the speed of your pipeline will
show you how long it typically takes for candidates to go from the "first contacted" stage to
"hired".
A sourced candidate's time to hire needs to be tracked from the moment that you first contact
them, not when they enter your ATS like normal.
This is because there is an entire process of outreach, nurture and qualification that a sourced
candidate goes through before they're ready to apply. By tracking pipeline speed you'll get insight
into how efficient and effective your team are at this side of the process.
You'll learn:
It doesn't matter how many people your team add to your pipeline every week if the standard is
poor. To make sure your team are identifying the right kind of candidates, you should focus on
metrics that indicate quality.
Candidates that your team sources have already been vetted to some degree, (you've reviewed
their information on sites like LinkedIn, Github and Dribbble), and should be a great match for
open roles (you've cherry-picked them, they aren't untargeted applications).
If your team are finding the right kind of candidates, then you'll get positive feedback from
recruiters that are handling screening.
On the other hand, if the candidates you've found can't make it through the screening process,
then you need to take a good hard look at your sourcing process.
Sourcing is hard.
Anyone can plug a few keywords into LinkedIn, but to uncover the talent that no one else is
finding, that requires real skill. The world's best sourcing teams commit to the idea of deliberate
practice to constantly improve and enhance their skills.
Deliberate practice is a concept that popular author and blogger Cal Newport talks about at length
in his book 'So Good They Can't Ignore You', (recommended for anyone interested in personal
development).
It's the art of consistently improving your skill set by intentionally stretching yourself to reach
new heights.
For an aspiring writer, this might involve pushing yourself to write on new subjects and for new
publications that are above your previous level.
For a sourcer it means a concerted effort to take on harder roles to fill and master different
sourcing mediums (e.g. learning how to source on Stack Overflow).
Spending time "out of your comfort zone" like this is the fastest way to improve , and should be a
consideration for anyone interested in improving their skills.