The New Hiring ecosystem: part 2 - sourcing
3 mins, 42 secs read time
In my last post, I outlined three major areas of product innovation we are seeing across our rapidly growing ecosystem: talent marketing, sourcing, and hiring. I focused on how talent marketing is evolving and what to look for when evaluating products in that category. In this post, I’ll dig into our next category, sourcing.
As our ecosystem continues to grow, we are seeing more options for recruiters and talent teams to discover new talent. And across sourcing solutions, there has been a big shift from focusing on increasing the quantity of candidates received to improving the overall quality of candidates instead.
Sourcing
Fundamentally, sourcing products should help you with at least one of these efforts:
- Leveraging precise networks
- Expanding and scaling your team on demand
- Establishing metrics that matter
1. Leveraging precise networks
With so many sourcing avenues, recruiting teams need to first define the types of jobs and candidates they are looking for before seeking out a solution. It’s better to be precise and narrow in your search than broad and undefined; the spray and pray model of yesteryear no longer works in today’s recruiting world.
One way to do this is to utilize your existing network and invest in the team you’ve already built.
This could take the shape of a more advanced referral system that assists your employees in finding candidates already in their network. We already think of our people as differentiators compared to our competition. Why not double down on what you already have? And, as it turns out, it’s difficult to keep track of everyone in your own network and what each person’s skills and career path looks like. Teamable, a product in our ecosystem, helps with both. Their solution empowers their customers to find more diverse candidate pools through the connections their employees already have, and then it surfaces qualified candidates that might have been missed simply because we cannot keep track of everyone in our lives.
2. Expand and scale your team on demand
Another approach to being more dynamic with sourcing is to scale the capabilities of your own recruiting team.
Two easy to implement practices include utilizing on-demand recruiters for specialty roles and automating common, repetitive tasks through machine learning-led assistance.
In today’s world, you don’t have to be the expert; you just need to know where to find one. Agency marketplaces like BountyJobs give companies the ability to plug niche recruiters in and out of your team as new roles open. And, with the shift toward more candidate-focused relationships, teams need to act and function more like agencies than ever before, creating long-lasting relationships with their candidates and prospects, without feeling the need to have specialty recruiters in house.
Over the last decade, recruiting teams have adopted workflow-based products that have helped organize and structure the hiring process. Now, those same teams can layer automation on top of their workflows to give their coordinators super powers. These automated recruiting assistants are tools that work alongside your team to help triage information, facilitate assessments, and refine qualification criteria.
3. Establish metrics that matter
With all of these new tools, it’s important to think about and focus on the metrics that matter to your organization. For some of you, speed may be paramount as you are managing a myriad of inbound candidates which would make time to hire your most important metric. For others, retention or percent of qualified candidates is the metric to prioritize.
Remember, not all metrics are going to fit for every role. For instance, if you are hiring an executive, time to hire may limit your search as these efforts can take substantial time and energy.
Whichever you choose, as you look for sourcing tools, make sure that the metrics that those tools deliver and optimize resonate and matter to you. Don’t let the tool dictate what matters!
Coming up
The innovation doesn’t stop at sourcing. Stay tuned for my final post in this series which will outline trends in hiring solutions and discuss how to continue developing your recruiting tech stack.
Check out our partners page to learn more about the solutions we have available today and request demos of any product.
Thanks to Dinah Alobeid, Emily Brooks, Garret Starr, Jillian Trubee, and Ben Vines for reading drafts of this post.