14 Tips to Supercharge Your Candidate Sourcing Strategy

The torrid pace of innovations in technology is driving everything from the way people exchange money to the way organizations find and recruit talent, also known as candidate sourcing. In this fiercely competitive job market, professional recruiters need every competitive edge they can gain to find the perfect talent in the market. Every component of HR, from sourcing to performance measurement, is becoming more digitized as organizations discover that the rules of candidate recruitment have been permanently changed by the pandemic. To help your organization succeed at the recruiting game, here are 14 of the best tips that we’ve found to supercharge your candidate sourcing strategy.

What Is Candidate Sourcing?

Candidate sourcing is the process of finding and attracting potential candidates for your open positions. It involves identifying, researching, and contacting candidates who match your job requirements and employer brand. Candidate sourcing can be done through various channels, such as online platforms, social media, referrals, events, or networking.

Candidate sourcing is an essential part of the recruitment process, as it helps you build a pipeline of qualified and interested candidates for your current and future hiring needs. It can also help you reduce your hiring costs, time, and risks by enabling you to reach out to passive candidates who might not apply through traditional methods.

Challenges In Candidate Sourcing

While candidate sourcing can bring many benefits to your hiring process, it also comes with some challenges that you need to overcome. Some of the common challenges in candidate sourcing are:

• Finding the right candidates: With the abundance of online platforms and tools, finding candidates is not the problem. The problem is finding the right candidates who fit your job criteria and company culture. You need to have a clear understanding of your target persona and use relevant keywords and filters to narrow down your search.
• Standing out from the competition: You are not the only one looking for talent. You need to differentiate yourself from other employers and showcase your value proposition to attract and retain candidates’ attention. You also need to have a strong employer’s brand and a compelling job offer that highlights your benefits, perks, and opportunities.
• Engaging with candidates: Once you find the right candidates, you need to engage with them and build a relationship with them. You need to communicate with them in a timely, personalized, and consistent manner. You need to provide them with useful and relevant information about your company and industry. You also need to follow up with them regularly and keep them updated on their application status.

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 1: Build a Powerful Employer Brand

Your brand as a company is far more than just the service or product that your organization offers to the marketplace; it is the feeling or the emotions that are generated when people think of your product, services, or even your organization’s name.  

Let’s look at Apple as an example. It is a brand that has been so well-cultivated over the years that you couldn’t convince Apple loyalists to use any other product if you tried. That brand is the organization’s most powerful competitive asset in the marketplace.  When consumers are tattooing the Apple logo on their arms to show their loyalty, that’s a powerful brand at work.

The important thing to remember is that your brand is a promotional tool that can persuade passive and active job seekers alike to seek employment with your organization. Remember, the majority of candidates value the ability to find information related to your organization’s brand during the application process.    

Building your brand can begin with forming a mission statement and then promoting examples of how your organization lives that mission statement on social media. Using social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to promote your company as a great place to work is a start. 

Building a strong career page is also helping you showcase your employer branding. Manatal, a well designed Applicant Tracking System provides its clients the ability to promote their brand while showcasing the essence of their organization through completely customizable career pages. 

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 2: Choose the Right Channels

The first point of contact that you make with prospective candidates is likely to happen on the internet, so organizations should be prepared to meet them there with a dynamic and engaging career page.  There are, of course, all the major job boards that you should also be considering such as Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google for Jobs as well as many specialized job boards.  Much of this will depend on the type of job and unique skills that an organization is prospecting for.

While it is difficult to point out to you exactly what the right channels are for each job, there are very powerful and intuitive recruitment management systems to help you automatically distribute your job posting to the best channels across the globe in just a few simple clicks.  These systems are also very resourceful in their ability to let you cast a much wider net for candidates.

One of the systems available on the market is an Applicant Tracking System. An ATS like Manatal comes with the ability to automatically share job posts across online platforms, including 2,000 free and premium job boards as well as social media sites like Linkedin and Facebook. 

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 3: Strive for Higher Levels of Candidate Engagement

The experience that you are offering candidates via online channels is crucial.  Because you want to build a reputation as a great employer – engagement helps your organization achieve this.  Candidate engagement is a means of keeping candidates interested in working for your organization, and in this kind of job market, it is crucial that candidate engagement be maintained from the beginning to the end of the hiring process. 

Maintaining a higher level of candidate engagement solves this problem. By investing in the right tools to help your professional recruiters provide consistent communication throughout the hiring process. You are investing in resources that can make enormous contributions to your candidate sourcing strategies. 

Organizations that are leading in candidate engagement have achieved such results by making strategic investments in talent recruitment software that can distribute automation while personalizing emails and texts to candidates to maintain their interest. 

A software like Manatal’s Application Tracking System is able to maintain candidate engagement through the mass emailing feature, for instance. You can make sure that your updates and announcements will always be delivered to candidates with the ability to manage the recipient list at all times.

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Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 4. Embrace Modern Technology

According to a report by LinkedIn, 68% of recruiters believe that investing in new recruitment technologies is the best way to elevate their candidate sourcing strategy. HR technologies, including HRIS, resume databases, and talent recruitment software systems are all now considered key strategic investments for the modern organization.  

Technology recruitment systems come in many forms, but the one most capable of supercharging your candidate sourcing strategy is a cloud-based applicant tracking system (ATS). An ATS is able to dramatically accelerate traditional HR processes by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automates tasks like job postings, applicant screening, and so on. 

A powerful Applicant Tracking System like Manatal enables recruiters to glide through the recruitment process quickly, smoothly, and efficiently. With simplified features such as job sharing across multiple platforms, CV parsing, social media enrichment, AI recommendations, candidate score cards, team chat, integrated calendar, and more, ensure that you will be able to attract high-quality candidates and turn them into new hires in a heartbeat. 

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 5: Make it Easy for Candidates to Apply

As society goes increasingly more digital and global, it has only served to elevate expectations from candidates, and it begins with the candidate’s desire to experience a fast, straightforward application process that can be done on a mobile phone. Be mindful of the fact that millennials and Gen Z candidates do just about everything in their lives using their mobile devices, and a fair amount of them use their devices for job search and submit applications. Your application process needs to accommodate this lifestyle, or you risk alienating the largest segment of the U.S. workforce.  

Remember, you stand to lose one of every two candidates if your application process appears outdated. Your organization’s outward-facing recruitment database is a direct reflection of your organization’s brand – invest wisely in it.

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 6: Optimize Data Analytics

We discussed earlier how an ATS platform could serve as a strategic investment by automating many traditional HR processes, but that’s not all.  An ATS’s functionality as a resume database means these platforms can become absolute gold mines over the course of time as they inventory all the details of the many applicants who apply to your organization. 

Widely recognized within HR as Talent Acquisition Metrics, these golden nuggets of data can be crucial to your candidate sourcing success over time as they can reveal unknown statistics that your organization might be entirely unaware of.  For example, these analytics can help you understand why certain candidate sourcing strategies succeed and why some fail.  Modern ATS systems can help you extract this crucial data and allow you to make strategic improvements to your sourcing strategies.

The more common analytics that is often evaluated is time to fill a job opening, source of hire, the costs of not filling a vacancy, offer acceptance rate and the most resourceful channels. These analytics can also play a key role in cost projections and forecasting. 

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 7: Understand the Value of Passive Candidates

70% of the global workforce can be categorized as passive candidates. These workers are not actively looking for a new position but are receptive to a new opportunity should one arise.  

So why are they so special?  

These candidates are usually content in their current roles and are obviously valuable to their current employers, meaning they’re usually a good catch.  The secret to attracting a passive candidate is to get their attention, but you need to think beyond job advertisements on standard channels like Indeed, Glassdoor, and CareerBuilder. Passive candidates just aren’t often frequenting these sites, so focus on continually strengthening your brand and adopting a strong social media presence.  An employee referral program can also serve to entice passive job seekers.

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 8: Leverage Employee Referrals

One of the best ways to source qualified candidates is to tap into your existing workforce. Your employees can act as your brand ambassadors and help you reach out to their networks of contacts. Employee referrals can help you find passive candidates who might not be actively looking for a job but are open to new opportunities. They can also reduce your hiring costs, time, and risks, as referrals tend to have higher retention and performance rates than other sources.

To leverage employee referrals, you need to create a referral program that rewards and recognizes your employees for their contributions. You can offer incentives such as cash bonuses, gift cards, or extra vacation days for successful referrals.

To get started with employee referrals for your sourcing needs, check out our email templates for referrals:

• Employee Referrals email template
• Employee Referral Program email template
• Referral Request from Alumni email template
• Employee Referrals From External Network email template
• Employee Referral Program Rewards Announcement email template

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 9: Diversify Your Talent Pool

Diversity and inclusion are not only ethical and social goals but also business imperatives. A diverse talent pool can help you attract more customers, foster innovation, and improve performance. A diverse talent pool can also help you avoid skills gaps and talent shortages by expanding your reach and access to different groups of candidates.

To diversify your talent pool, you need to go beyond posting on generic job boards and use niche platforms that cater to specific groups of candidates. For example, you can use recruitment platforms to target candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. You also need to review your job descriptions and eliminate any biased or exclusive language that might deter some candidates from applying. For instance, you can use gender-neutral terms, avoid jargon or acronyms, and highlight your commitment to diversity and inclusion. Check out our complete guide on promoting diversity through recruitment tools here.

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 10: Nurture Your Talent Pipeline

Sourcing candidates is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process that requires constant communication and engagement. You need to nurture your talent pipeline by providing relevant and personalized content that keeps them interested and informed about your company and industry. For example, you can send them newsletters, blogs, podcasts, webinars, or case studies that showcase your company culture, values, projects, and achievements. You can also invite them to events such as career fairs, workshops, or meetups where they can interact with your team members and learn more about your company.

By nurturing your talent pipeline, you can build trust and loyalty with your candidates and increase the chances of converting them into hires. You can also reduce your time-to-hire and improve your quality-of-hire by having a pool of warm leads that are ready and eager to join your company.

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 11: Use Social Media to Showcase Your Company Culture

Social media is a powerful tool for attracting and engaging potential candidates. It opens a lane for you to showcase your company culture, values, mission, and achievements in a creative and authentic way. By sharing stories, photos, videos, and testimonials from your employees, candidates will have a glimpse of what it’s like to work at your company and why they should join your team. You can start building your company culture through social media by choosing the right platforms for your target audience. For example, LinkedIn is a professional network that can help you reach passive candidates, while Instagram and TikTok are more visual and casual platforms that can help you appeal to younger and more diverse candidates.

One thing to keep in mind is to create a consistent and engaging brand voice that reflects your company’s personality and values. Use hashtags, emojis, and humor to make your posts more relatable and memorable. Also, encourage your employees to share their experiences and stories on social media. You can create a dedicated hashtag or a campaign for them to participate in, like #LifeAt[your company name], which employees can use to share their work-life balance, team spirit, and career growth at the company.

And don’t forget to respond to comments and messages from candidates and followers. Show your appreciation, answer their questions, and invite them to apply or join your talent pool. This can help you build trust and rapport with potential candidates and increase your conversion rate.

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 12: Create and Share Valuable Content

Another way to attract and engage potential candidates is to create and share valuable content that highlights your expertise, insights, and thought leadership in your industry. It goes without saying that providing useful and relevant information can help you demonstrate your credibility, authority, and innovation and position yourself as an employer of choice.

So, start with blog posts, articles, white papers, and case studies that highlight your best practices, achievements, challenges, and solutions in your field. You can also share your opinions, predictions, and trends on current and future topics that are relevant to your industry and audience. Also, invest your time and effort in webinars, podcasts, and live streams that feature experts, leaders, and influencers in your industry.

You can take inspiration from Manatal’s All-In Recruitment.

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 13: Attend and Host Networking Events

Networking events are great opportunities to meet and connect with potential candidates in person or online. They allow you to shine a spotlight on your brand, culture, and values while building relationships with talented and like-minded professionals in your industry.

Before you do anything, research and identify the events that are relevant and suitable for your target audience and your goals. Also, prepare and practice your elevator pitch and your value proposition that summarizes who you are, what you do, and why you are different and better than your competitors.

Once you’ve got that down, it’s time to look for some events. You can start with industry conferences, trade shows, and seminars that bring together experts, leaders, and influencers from your field. You can attend these events as a speaker, sponsor, exhibitor, or attendee and share your knowledge, insights, and solutions with your audience. You can also host your own events that focus on specific topics or themes that interest your audience and invite them to join and participate.

Career fairs, job fairs, and hiring events are also good options for you to attend these events as an employer or you can host your own that highlight your current and future openings and the skills and qualifications that you are looking for. After these events, ensure to follow up and stay in touch with the people that you’ve met and connected with.

Candidate Sourcing Strategy Tip 14: Collaborate with Educational Institutions

Educational institutions are valuable sources of talent and potential candidates. They can help you reach and recruit students, graduates, and alumni who have the skills, qualifications, and potential that you are looking for. It is a good start to partner with universities, colleges, and schools that offer courses, programs, and degrees that are relevant and aligned with your industry and your needs. You can offer scholarships, sponsorships, or donations to support their students and their education. You can also provide guest lectures, workshops, or mentoring sessions to share your expertise, insights, and advice with their students and faculty.

Another way to go around it is creating and offering internships, apprenticeships, or co-op programs that provide students and graduates with hands-on and practical experience and exposure to your company and your work. Provide feedback, coaching, and guidance to help them learn, grow, and succeed. This opens a good opportunity for you to expand your team by hiring them as full-time or part-time employees if they perform well and fit your culture.

Last but not least, you can also join and participate in alumni networks, associations, and groups that connect you with former students and graduates who have gone on to pursue careers in your industry or related fields. Share your company’s news, updates, and opportunities with them and invite them to apply or refer others. Also, ask them to share their stories, testimonials, and referrals with their peers and networks.

Conclusion

Most if not all of the tips mentioned above are greatly enhanced when organizations take advantage of the latest innovations in HR technologies. In the post-pandemic and tech-fueled society that we live in, HR professionals are rapidly understanding that considering new innovations in technology is the best way to compete in this fiercely competitive job market. 

However, if your goal truly is to supercharge your candidate sourcing strategies, then applying the tips above will work best only after standardizing processes, eliminating waste, and investing in digitalization where possible. Otherwise, the organizations that choose to continue “dragging their feet” are likely to get left behind.