Recruiting Online: 5 Step Guide to Sourcing Excellent Candidates

Attracting top talent when recruiting online is essential to the future of your organization. In your talent sourcing activities, developing a talent pipeline increases your chances of hiring the best candidates for your company.

Recruiting the right candidate will mean lower employee turnover and great productivity. On the other side of the equation, hiring the wrong candidate can mean harming your company culture and wasting resources on training an employee who will only be around temporarily

In building your talent pipeline, it’s important you develop a full strategy that targets the right candidates. How do you find top talent?

The following candidate sourcing strategies will help you fill your funnel with qualified talent while recruiting online

Stay In Lockstep With The Hiring Manager When Recruiting Online

Align with your hiring managers early and often to ensure that you’re on the same page about what a strong candidate looks like. This is one of the best ways to source candidates when recruiting online.

Below are some ways to increase the quality of your communication and get on the same page:

• Hold a kickoff meeting as soon as you receive a requisition to learn about the role and align on must-have and nice-to-have qualifications.
• Ask your hiring manager to help you build a list of sourcing channels where your ideal candidates may have a presence, and a list of role-specific keywords to search.
• Run a few searches together to discuss why specific candidates may or may not be a good fit for the role.
• Review the overall talent pool and determine if the requirements need to be tightened up or relaxed in order to find the right number of candidates.

Don’t stop at the kickoff meeting. Be in constant contact with your hiring manager throughout the recruitment process to check on the quality and quantity of candidates, and fine-tune your search with their feedback.

Sourcing Candidates With Your ATS Is The Best First Step

If you devote time to sourcing quality candidates, you won’t just end up with a hire. You’ll also have candidates who are qualified to recruit for future roles. But for many companies, re-engaging candidates is a missed opportunity. Even though nearly all (99%) of companies believe re-engaging candidates will help them build their talent community and protect their employer brand, fewer than half of employers re-engage declined candidates.

Leverage your team’s past efforts by beginning every search with the candidates your team has already deemed qualified to work at your organization while recruiting online. In order to successfully work with archived candidates, you’ll need a plan in place for engagement:

• Track why candidates weren’t hired. You can only re-engage candidates if you’re keeping tabs on why they don’t make it to ‘hired’ It can help to use an applicant tracking system to record all of this information.
• Give feedback. Talent is four times more likely to consider your company for a future opportunity when you offer them constructive feedback, yet only 41% of candidates have received interview feedback before.
• Circle back. 80% of job seekers would be three and a half times more likely to re-apply to a company if they were notified of their application status.

Diversify Your Online Candidate Sourcing Channels

The most common methods for candidate sourcing when recruiting online are common for a reason – they’re good! – but consider adding some other, less frequently used sources into the mix.

Candidates may be more receptive to outreach messages on less common websites, and profiles on such sites can yield unique information for personalized outreach. If you’re new to sourcing for a job, rely on your team members to find out where to go, and ask them questions like:

• From the perspective of someone who’s been deep in this domain for a while, where might you start a search for this?
• Where might this community congregate?
• What companies are focused on similar tech/products/services?
• Do people in this role go by multiple job titles? What are they?
• Other, more general, but worthwhile online sourcing channels include Aevy, AngelList (for tech talent), Entelo, Facebook, Hired, Sourcing.io, Twitter, and Xing.

Use Your Employees’ Network For Sourcing Candidates

Organizations can expand their talent pool 10 times by recruiting online through their employees’ networks. Run candidate sourcing sessions with your team to see if anyone in your employees’ networks would be a good fit for one of your open roles.

Your employees can help you reach untapped talent, and improve response rates from candidates they know. Facebook, for instance, will show your employees different candidate search results based on their own social graph, so you can uncover candidates you wouldn’t have otherwise found.

Perfect Your Outreach Messages For Sourcing Candidates

You’ve worked hard to source the right candidates, but that doesn’t matter if they won’t engage with you. This is where outreach can help you in your talent sourcing process when recruiting online.

Outreach recruiting examples include basic tips that make your messaging more candidate-focused. View it as a way to offer superior customer service to your prospective candidates, because the messaging is similar. You want to focus on their needs and wants. Your message targets the candidate’s goals, not your company’s. It turns the tables on traditional hiring methods and makes your talent the priority.

A few rules of thumb to keep in mind:

• Lead with a subject line that will stand out and make the candidate want to open and read your message.
• Always personalize your message with relevant information about the candidate.
• Paint a brief picture of the role and your organization.
• Explain how you think they could contribute to the team.

Conclusion

The best candidates are in such high demand that it’s necessary to be more strategic if you want to win them for your team. These candidate sourcing strategies can help you fill your pipeline with qualified talent so you can choose the best hire for your team when recruiting online.

EVA-REC is a full-fledged hiring platform that does the heavy lifting for you and makes sure your hiring is hassle-free. Think of EVA-REC as the indispensable teammate who can shockingly and easily automate all your hiring processes, streamline your HR functions, and allow you to recruit the right talent today, tomorrow, and every day.

Request a free demo and see how our hiring platform can help you achieve hiring success!

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