Sourcing channels in talent acquisition

Having a successful talent acquisition sourcing strategy helps companies recruit proactively and maintain a healthy pipeline of candidates. In addition to finding top talent, it is necessary to develop talent sourcing methods to network with top talent and convert them into applicants. Find out more!

Sourcing top talent can be a tough task. As the job market quickly recovers past the pandemic, organizations and talent sourcing companies need to look to innovative strategic talent acquisition roadmaps to recruit and hire top talent. They need to build an accurate talent acquisition sourcing strategy.

Talent sourcing begins before recruitment and hiring. A well-defined talent sourcing strategy is not only to get quality candidates to fill open positions but also to create candidate engagement and enhance the candidate experience.

There are several candidate sourcing practices organizations can deploy to ensure they have a quality talent pool at their fingertips. Talent sourcing channels are the means by which organizations identify and connect with the top talent they would like to hire.

There is no talent sourcing strategy template, no foolproof method; it is just a matter of analysing all the existing sourcing channels in talent acquisition and comparing the percentage of applications with the percentage of impressions of the positions, by measuring the inbound conversion rate.

When it comes to sourcing the best talent, the talent sourcing agency is the most traditional and “convenient” solution for organizations that are less familiar with technology and sourcing tools.

Recruitment and staffing agencies are accustomed to recruit people quickly and have considerable expertise in the field they recruit. As an example, if we think of temporary job positions, they need to be covered in the shortest possible time. Moreover, staffing organizations usually cultivate relationships with many people registered at their offices or databases, they know the sector they operate in very well and often promote their brand and activities by working by “word of mouth”.

Referrals are ways to build a talent pool when directly sourcing top talent. Processes through which employees recommend qualified people from their network for possible recruitment. In return, employers can encourage a steady flow of referred candidates into the direct sourcing program by rewarding every referrer that leads to a hire.

Referral programs are profitable: current employees have a hands-on experience with a given company culture, which means they can easily recommend candidates who make the best cultural fit for that organization. Furthermore, through that sourcing channel organizations get quality candidates’ contacts straight to their inbox and can directly invite them to an interview, which allows saving valuable time and effort.

Posting jobs on job boards, recruiting platforms and social networks help boost recruitment and is a good price-performance ratio solution.
As regards to job boards, whether free or paid, generic or specialized, they are designed to receive a lot of traffic and invest a lot on that. For that reason, on the one hand they can reach a wide and diverse audience with just one job advert; on the other hand, they allow companies to find the most skilled people or tech talent.

In addition, job boards or platforms like LinkedIn are sourcing channels that typically integrate with Applicant Tracking Systems like JobArch, ATS for small and mid-size organizations, which include multiposting tools spreading the jobs posted on the career pages on several job platforms online. This makes them even more effective.

As for social networks like Facebook and Twitter, they allow approaching an audience sample, who, in some cases, might be the least skilled part of the population, but who is definitely very active online and always looking for new job opportunities.
However, although job boards increase the influx of candidates, if organizations do not have a tool to manage them, with a careers page integrated into their site, their role remains an end in itself.

Sourcing top candidates begins with companies’ employer brands. Corporate career sites are no longer just static job pages with corporate descriptions; they are a dynamic shop window for organizations to reach even more qualified applicants.

Firstly, a career page, exactly as proposed by JobArch, ATS and CRM for SMEs, is usually integrated within the corporate website. All applicants are funnelled through one single tool, which enables recruiters to work on just one sourcing channel and browse through available candidate data for the right fit. It is also an extremely useful section not only to list one’s jobs but also to make one’s brand known. It tells about corporate values and may contain photos and videos of the team in order to impress prospective candidates and project a consistent company image to prospective job seekers. Moreover, that page can be indexed through SEO tools and search engines like Google.

Secondly, recruiters and talent sourcing companies need to start sourcing talent before opening a job vacancy, because they have to build a talent pool to draw on at the right time. Posting job adverts on one’s own site is faster than posting them on other platforms, that may reach results more rapidly and it is less expensive at the same time, reducing cost-of-hire.
Thirdly, delivering one’s career page for searching top talent enables organizations to meet multi-language, multi-cultural, regional, national and international compliance demands.

The career page is one of the best talent sourcing tools and strategies, if not the best ever: it reaches the most demanding candidates, often the passive ones, who are more difficult to win over. Since today’s passive candidates may be active tomorrow, if the company talent pool is “nurtured” early on, the overall time-to-hire may also be reduced.