Recruiting high-performing professionals who can get results for your organization isn’t easy. It involves mastering every stage of full life cycle recruiting. That involves identifying the right candidate and seeing the entire process through to the end, equipping yourself with the right tools and information needed to find and land the best candidates.
One of the most crucial components of full cycle recruiting is the sourcing stage. It’s necessary for companies looking to hire the right people for their organization while building a skilled, competent pipeline of candidates. But what is involved in this part of the process, and what are the strategies successful recruiters use to nail recruitment sourcing?
Let’s take a closer look at what sourcing is, how it fits into the full recruiting lifestyle, and why your team should prioritize it.
What is full cycle recruiting?
Before we dive into the sourcing stage of the process, let’s take a quick look at the stages of full life cycle recruiting. Full life cycle recruiting is a holistic solution that can empower small to medium-sized businesses to hire quality talent without large recruitment teams. It can also make large recruiting teams lean and efficient.
Full cycle recruiting channels an organization’s recruiting capabilities into a process. It allows a single recruiter to facilitate the entire apply-to-hire recruiting cycle.
While organizations adapt the full cycle recruiting process to their needs, it takes place in 6 general recruiting process steps:
- Preparing: The full cycle recruiter works with the hiring manager to define the needs for the position. This process includes highlighting the problems the organization wants to address, the qualifications of an ideal applicant, and the job duties.
- Sourcing: The recruiter uses the job description and qualifications to create a list of candidates from a pool of applicants using job boards, social media, and other tools. Internal and passive candidates with the right qualifications can also be encouraged to apply.
- Screening: The recruiter reviews candidate resumes and applications from the sourcing step to eliminate unqualified candidates and offers a phone screen to assess candidates that make the cut.
- Selecting: The recruiter discusses candidates with the highest potential to succeed in the position with the hiring manager. The hiring manager or recruiter works with management to schedule interviews as a final assessment of the candidate for selection.
- Hiring: The recruiter sends a job offer to the preferred candidate, and finalizes background and reference checks, pay negotiations, and start dates.
- Onboarding: The recruiter or HR team will take the final step in the full cycle recruitment process. They arrange for the employee to arrive and meet with a point-of-contact to ensure the organization makes a good impression to keep the new hire long-term.
What is sourcing?
Sourcing is the practice of finding candidates to consider for a new role within your company. There are a number of ways to do this (more on this below), and the best recruiters know the right places to find candidates.
Of course, candidate sourcing involves more than simply locating candidates. It involves finding the right candidates (and avoiding the wrong ones). Companies have jobs that need to be done and your sourced candidates should possess the necessary requirements needed to fulfill the role. These requirements can include technical and non-technical skills, certifications, and a certain kind of experience that makes them a good fit.
How does sourcing fit into the recruiting cycle?
One glance at the steps within the full recruiting life cycle will show you where sourcing falls: between preparation and screening. To get the most out of your sourcing efforts, you’ll want to understand why the process flows the way it does.
The preparation phase involves understanding what skills and experience the individual you’d like to hire will need. You’ll then input this into a well-written job description. It’s critical to have a well-defined list of roles and responsibilities because that sets appropriate expectations with your candidates. They’ll want to know the scope of the position before agreeing to move forward with an interview.
Transparency is key here – don’t undersell the number of duties you’re looking for in a role, only to add more later on. Withholding information will lead to disenfranchised candidates and might prolong your recruiting efforts.
Once you have the job description, you can then source your candidates. There are a variety of ways to do this, described in greater detail in the next section. You’ll then want to screen candidates you find on your initial search.
4 effective types of sourcing
Now that you understand how sourcing fits into the larger recruiting process, let’s take a deeper dive into how you can fill your recruiting pipeline with excellent candidates. According to Indeed, there are four methods for sourcing that many recruiters use (though this list isn’t comprehensive – you may be able to identify additional sourcing strategies to find the right person):
Internet job boards
Internet job boards are one of the most popular methods for sourcing candidates because they connect employers with candidates looking for jobs. Indeed, Glassdoor, and FlexJobs are just three of the many sites where companies can place their job postings. You can also actively search candidate profiles on these sites, targeting the key skills you need.
Social media
You can also use social media platforms to find candidates. LinkedIn is the most popular professional social network for this purpose (here are some sourcing tactics they recommend), but you can use other networks to find candidates. For example, if you’re looking for a video editor, the right candidate might use platforms like YouTube to showcase their talents.
Internal hires
Another popular method for finding candidates is looking within your organization through internal recruitment. You can fill some roles with people who already work for your company. This strategy involves having a robust internal job site in which candidates can match themselves with the right roles. It also involves making managers and leadership aware of this capability, encouraging internal mobility.
Employee referrals
Finally, one of the best ways to find good people is by asking the people you already trust: your own employees. Because people within your organization have a good grasp on what makes for a successful member of your team, they’ll be in a good position to connect you with people who fit your culture. You can offer them a referral bonus for linking you to skilled candidates within their network.
Sourcing is an essential part of any effective recruiting plan
The foundation of any successful organization is its people. You’ll want to have people with the right mixture of experience, skills, and values that help you get results for your clients and customers. Sourcing is how you find those people, and without it, your recruiting process steps will be incomplete.
Sourcing is one of the most important components of full life cycle recruiting. That’s why it’s so vital to partner with a team who can help you know how to target the best candidates for whatever goals you’re looking to achieve. With Comeet’s full range of recruiting services, we’re that partner.
Comeet’s platform equips you with the tools and information you’ll need to effectively and efficiently source, interview, and hire the right people. But it goes beyond just empowering you with the right capabilities – the Comeet platform moves your entire hiring process into one easy-to-use location, enabling collaboration between recruiters, HR, and your hiring managers.
At Comeet, we offer sourcing as part of our Elastic Sourcing service. For more on how Comeet can help you cultivate your recruiting pipeline, contact us today.
