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Any successful organization recognizes the value of having the right employees by building a database of vetted prospective employees ready to fill open positions when the opportunities arise. That’s what’s known as a talent pipeline.

But building a talent pipeline is no easy task. That’s because the talent market is now more dynamic than ever, characterized by stiff competition for top talent. It will take a little more effort and an excellent strategy to develop your talent pipeline. 

By that, we mean developing a candidate sourcing plan. This guide will help you understand candidate sourcing, what it entails, its benefits, and disadvantages, including where you can get help building your talent pipeline in Tampa, FL. 

What Is Candidate Sourcing? 

Simply put, candidate sourcing is proactively looking for qualified job candidates for existing or planned positions in a business. The process involves looking for both active and passive candidates with the right working knowledge, experience, and skill set to fill particular roles in an organization. 

Candidate sourcing is generally considered an early part of the recruitment process and helps you reach a bigger talent pool than actual recruiting. 

How Do You Find the Right Candidates?

Sourcing for job candidates is a process that usually includes:

Determining Future Openings 

Unlike recruiting, sourcing doesn’t wait for positions to open up. It’s a proactive process that usually includes anticipating what roles are likely to be available in the near future and starting talent acquisition. Since sourcing begins early, you have more time to search for and screen candidates for specific roles. 

Defining the Job Requirements 

Once you know what roles are likely to come up, the next thing is to determine the requirements for each role. Here, you can develop what’s known as a candidate persona. It should define what the right candidate for a role should possess in terms of skills and qualifications. 

Looking for Candidates

You know what roles you need to fill in the company’s supply chain and what you want in a candidate. Now, it’s time to search for candidates. 

As an equal opportunity employer who wants to diversify your talent pool, ensure you utilize online and offline methods. You can find active and passive job seekers through social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), online forums like Reddit, referrals, among other alternative solutions. 

Shortlist and Contact Candidates 

Next, shortlist candidates based on how well they match the candidate persona you’ve already created. This step aims to develop an interest in the candidate, whether they are seeking it or not. 

With that done, you can make the initial contact. You can call, email, or message the job seekers expressing your interest and discussing the role the company is offering. 

Perform the Screening 

Not every candidate will respond to the initial job alert. However, you can start screening those who do. The screening process should involve reviewing their resumes, skills, and qualifications, usually guided by the business objectives. 

Add Qualified Candidates to Your Talent Pipeline

Once the screening stage is done, you will have the final batch of candidates. You can forward this data directly to the hiring manager for the interviewing stage to begin if the company is hiring. But if the HR department hasn’t put out job alerts yet, the organization can add the candidates to its talent pool. 

Key Benefits of Candidate Sourcing

Today, sourcing is an essential part of the recruiting process, thanks to the many benefits it brings to the table. Let’s walk you through some of them below. 

Gives You Ready Access to Suitable Hires

Developing a pipeline of potential hires is an excellent way for companies to stay ahead of their workforce needs. Sourcing enables you to discover prospects way before the need for them arises. For this reason, you do not have to go through lengthy hiring processes when you want to replace an employee. 

Saves You Time

As an employer, walking away from an interview feeling like the session was a total waste of time can be quite frustrating. Sourcing allows for the pre-qualification of potential recruits based on the details they provide on online platforms. 

As a result, you only need to turn to your applicant tracking system or database to find the prospective employee you need, saving you a great deal of time. 

Improves Offer Acceptance Rate

Sourcing strategies such as social sourcing on Twitter and networking within professional organizations offer a unique chance of making personal connections with potential hires. Since prospects may not have such a connection with their current employers or those trying to recruit them at the moment, creating personal relationships with them can make a fundamental difference.

After all, a candidate will be more inclined to start contract negotiation if they view you as an equal opportunity employer and have an existing relationship with you. Sourcing shines at creating such connections, making it an excellent way to boost your offer acceptance rates and reduce candidate response time. 

Provides Access to References

Sourcing offers a great door to a candidate’s background via blogs, Twitter accounts, or LinkedIn profiles. For this reason, it makes an excellent channel for discovering mutual connections that could offer credible opinions regarding potential hires. 

Gives You a Wider Reach

Candidate sourcing projects that look for qualified applicants via a candidate management system and social recruiting allow you to reach prospects that conventional vacancy ads cannot. It is a more proactive approach to recruiting using technology, regardless of location or role. 

You can take things a notch higher by diversifying your networks to local, online, niche, state, and even country candidates. 

Disadvantages of Candidate Sourcing

Despite the many benefits, sourcing has a few downsides. These are:

• There is no guarantee that the qualified candidates in your talent pipeline will be available to fill your positions when the time comes. 
• Disputes with existing employees can arise when they discover that you have fresh candidates in line to replace them. 

Need Help Candidate Sourcing Tampa, FL? Velocity Resource Group Has Got You Covered 

Sourcing is a proactive way of discovering potential job candidates in Tampa, FL, for existing and future job positions. It allows human resources to find passive and active jobseekers by looking through various job boards, social media sites, corporate forums, and other professional networks. 

If you need help with sourcing in Tampa, FL, get in touch with Velocity Resource Group. Our experienced sourcing team leverages various innovative tools to ensure that we match you with the best hires for current and future job openings. Give Velocity Resource Group a call today at 813-586-1700.

Several elements make up a great company- investors, management, products/ services, customers, and employees. Of these critical aspects, the employees are considered the ‘backbone of the business. So, if a company is to get ahead of the competition, carve a niche for itself, and possibly survive well into the future, it must invest in top talent. 

It is the recruiter’s job to source, assess, and hire exceptional talent for a company. But, while there’s no shortage of people looking for employment in virtually all industries, not everyone who needs the job is suited for it.

As a recruiter, you should have a couple of strategies up your sleeve if you’re going to be good at what you do. That said, here are eight tested candidate sourcing strategies that you should know as a corporate talent acquisition manager: 

Understand the Importance of Candidate Sourcing

Candidate sourcing is the most effective way to open yourself up to great talent you otherwise didn’t have. It involves being proactive as you look for and engage qualified candidates for an open position in your company. That includes actively and passively searching for employees. 

A company’s talent pool is directly linked to its performance and prospects, which is why a well-devised candidate sourcing process is so important. If you understand the importance of candidate sourcing, you can come up with relevant goals and strategies.

Come Up with an Ideal Candidate Sourcing Persona

Probably the first thing you should do before you start sourcing for someone to fill up a role is to think about the ideal candidate and create what’s known as a candidate persona. That way, you can figure out the best sourcing strategies.

A candidate persona is a fictional profile that describes the best person for a specific role. It allows hiring managers to figure out the kind of talent they want. The persona should describe the desired skill set, work experience, educational, career goals, written and verbal communication skills, location, and other relevant information. 

A good candidate persona should be created after in-depth research and input from other key players in the company. 

Utilize Social Media to Find Passive Candidates 

Traditional methods, like referrals and job boards, may have worked in your recruiting process so far. But most of those sourcing strategies help you find actively searching candidates. 

If you want to broaden your scope and find diverse talent pools, you’ll need to think outside the box. In this case, we’re talking about modern sourcing strategies such as social media. 

Social media is one of the best places hiring managers can find and woo passive candidates. Build a social media presence, be a part of the right conversations, and diversify your online sourcing strategies by targeting niche forums too. 

Remember, finding qualified applicants through social media takes more than just posting the open positions. You also need to promote the company culture.  

Develop a Data-Driven Plan to Find Top Talent

Using a data-driven approach in your recruitment process can not only help you find the right candidates but attract them to apply for the job you’re offering. Successful hiring managers know what employees are looking for and build their sourcing strategies around that. 

Human resource data like exit surveys and employee surveys can give you important insights to help you target top talent during the recruitment process. 

Don’t Ignore Offline Talent Sourcing Methods Too.

It’s easy for hiring managers to focus on online candidate sourcing channels only. However, venturing offline and meeting potential candidates at one-on-one events is an excellent way of sourcing qualified talent. 

Consider attending job or industry-specific seminars and events to pool together prospective employees during the recruiting process. Alternatively, create your meetings and invite people you feel will help execute business priorities. 

Including offline talent sourcing methods in the recruitment process allows you to stand out as an employer, which means that potential candidates are more likely to follow up with you. You can get the most out of this approach by asking other recruiting team members to seek prospects proactively.  

Take Advantage of Recruiting Tools for Hiring Managers

You need to tap into the potential of the many innovative recruitment solutions available in today’s competitive recruitment space. These tools can help you significantly cut down on recruitment time and the costs of finding a suitable candidate. This way, you’ll always be ahead of the game. 

Social media, professional networks, online communities, video interview software, applicant tracking system, and reference checkers are excellent examples of recruiting tools hiring managers can utilize. There’s virtually a tool for every aspect of the recruitment process you want to enhance, from skill testing and selection to sourcing and communication. 

Create a Pipeline with Pre-Screening Questions Before Contacting Potential Candidates

Weeding out candidates who are not ideal for your organization can be challenging during the recruitment process flow. To determine if applicants should proceed further along your talent pipeline, you can ask them some pre-screening interview questions. This way, you can avoid wasting precious time on a candidate you don’t want to hire in the end. 

Below are some excellent pre-interview questions you can ask during candidate sourcing to find those who can deliver operational excellence.

• What professional responsibilities are you good at?
• What are your best knowledge areas?
• What are your weaknesses, and how do you overcome them?
• What are your strengths?
• How are your interpersonal abilities?

Be Sure to Follow Up After the Recruitment Process

While you might get a few candidates with the first recruiting email you send, you need to follow up on your other potential hires to improve your recruitment numbers. 

Following up on prospective employees that your applicant tracking system shortlists can effectively find quality candidates since it often generates more responses than initial reach-outs. After all, following up is sure to trigger a response from the other party. 

You can take things a notch higher by keeping in touch with qualified candidates who weren’t ready to go ahead with you after your first round of follow-ups. The second round of follow-ups is also a great way to find strong candidates you sourced but didn’t hire for other positions in your company.

The Right Talent Will Determine a Company’s Future 

If you are a recruiter looking to improve your candidate sourcing strategies, these eight tips should help you reduce the daunting manual work that goes into the recruitment process. It will also help you cut down further on time and costs in the recruiting process, and most importantly, put you in places where you can find highly skilled talent for the company. 

Remember, the right talent will improve your company’s overall performance. So, if you need help with your entire recruiting process in Tampa, FL, such as filling demanding roles or sorting through high volumes of candidates, make sure you work with Velocity Resource Group. We offer the best custom and on-demand recruitment solutions, so don’t hesitate to give us a call at 813-586-1700!

Imagine a new startup company with 200 empty roles that need to be filled with top and talented candidates, but how does the company get the word out to the concentrated labor market? Mind you, and the labor market consists of both gifted, talented, and exceptionally valuable candidates. One must be able to source the right people effectively. As a firm, how do you recruit the 200 best-talented people among the millions of people out there?

This is where candidate sourcing comes into play. Candidate sourcing is like picking the proverbial chaff from the wheat. It is identifying your desired talents that match the roles and skills you need from the crowd. It involves going into the market and sourcing for the candidate, researching, and sometimes emailing and reaching out to them to create a desired talent database.

After these processes are completed, the recruitment process comes into place to ensure the candidates fit perfectly into the envisioned roles. Sourcing before recruiting might sound stressful and needless since, after all, recruitment is the last step. But the companies that actively engage in it beg to differ.

If you are looking for assistance with candidate sourcing, reach out to the Velocity Resource Group. Our unique process for candidate sourcing, data mining, and pre-screening allows our clients to make the most of every recruiting dollar and connect with quality candidates fast.

The Importance of Candidate Sourcing in Recruitment

Sourcing is all about filtering the pool of candidates. The significant idea here is to make sure that the pool of candidates is at a higher quality level so that the final hire will be fantastic. If you choose from a pack of lower-quality candidates, you are already headed in the wrong direction.

But with the right help, you can obtain valuable professionals that are more vetted, as a firm like Velocity Resource Group combs through resumes, membership sites, and other digital communities to present higher quality individuals.

There are various sources to obtain a pool of candidates, and these sources can vary from social media networks to older methods like calling up individuals at multiple places. The value of sourcing to hiring managers is that it is proactive instead of reactive, which adds immense value to the process. It shows that the firm is looking at the hiring matter from a holistic standpoint instead of from a micro perspective. The truth is that it is better to have more proactive practices as it helps to hire managers to make significant decisions and minimizes their risk, labor, and issues to the company.

The internet and the world wide web present a wide variety of opportunities and many distractions. Remember that having a tried and true recruitment process helps you move through the clutter and get the right hires to your dynamic environment. Whether you are a global financial services company or a healthcare firm at a different job location, you want to have the best-qualified candidates to add value to your firm.

Here are a few more reasons why qualified candidates through the right technical recruiter who follows effective sourcing group policies are beneficial.

It gives the recruiter control.

Sourcing allows the recruiter to choose the set of talents they require; this advantage cannot be found in recruitment as there are loads of resumes to read, which transfers the control to their papers. Thus, the selection process found in recruitment has been removed, and the management of who is fit and who should be discarded lies solely in the recruiter’s hands.

The quality of hire is better.

But did know that among the chosen ones, there is a 5% chance that the top talent has a less attractive resume and will be overlooked. 42% of the resumes submitted for a particular job are unqualified and have little to no relevance, according to recent surveys. 17% of the candidates are still incapable of choosing resumes, but they may somehow have slipped through the filtering process.

In outsourcing, the resume is not the icing on the cake but rather a supplement. The recruiter gets to converse with the candidates and access their capabilities before adding them to the database of the chosen candidates. After a final decision, the quality of the hiring level when compared to straight recruitment is 50% better.

You want to make sure to work with the candidate that meets multiple deadlines, works independently, and conducts similar jobs to be a value add to the organization. That is why it is best to obtain the best talent from the start.

Reduces time and stress for managers.

For 200 vacant posts, there is 100 times the number of submitted resumes. So, who has the time to go through the 20,000 documents for just 200 positions perfectly? Assuming there are individuals to do so, how sure is the quality of the review rate; will all the documents be carefully scrutinized?

Sourcing first leaves you with only 2000 documents that can be checked carefully, saving the recruiter time and effort.

Reduces the cost of hire for managers.

The cost of hiring through direct recruitment is relatively higher than outsourcing because the chosen recruiter or recruitment company gets paid to do all the jobs. The company spends money on digital ads, printing bills, and posters, and erecting billboards to send out the message.

But with sourcing, you can take advantage of vetted and effective processes to obtain better candidates.

It increases the diversity of the hire.

Let’s face it, the issue of diversity is here to stay and will be a critical topic moving forward. So, as a new startup or an entrenched corporation, your workforce should contain top talents from all over the world with diverse skill sets and perspectives. 

Recruiting will get you top talents and top talents from different schools of thought, giving you a heterogeneous workforce compared to the regular homogeneity.

Cuts off those without credibility.

A recruiter’s worst nightmare is a talent that looks right for the job but is far from qualified. The desperation that accompanies them is bewildering. They are ready to do, say and write anything as long as they get the job. Unfortunately, 30% of the information provided by potential talent is false, and they are unqualified to be an effective addition to the end firm. Most sourcing centers on passive talents who already have credibility; they are 82% liable, to tell the truth as they already have opportunities, and lying gives them no advantage. 

Those with experience and working in current opportunities will undoubtedly be valuable in more ways than one as they will want to find ways to obtain better opportunities.

Also, they are more versed and technologically proficient as they are used to working, giving your company and your team more advantage. These are the best candidates for the job as they will use their drive, ambition, expertise, and knowledge to bring new energy to the job and your team at your location.

Reach Out to Our Team To Review Priorities and Overcome Challenges

Sourcing of candidates before recruitment gives a comparative advantage over direct recruitment. More companies have found the light in sourcing and adapting it as it increases the quality of hire, is less stressful, and provides a heterogeneous set of top talents. However, sourcing has not removed direct hiring as 70% of companies still engage in it. VRG is a recruiting-solutions company that leverages our global workforce to deliver resumes overnight. 

Our disciplined process for candidate pre-screening and recruiting efficiency is an unparalleled strategic advantage to companies looking for qualified candidates.

Contact us today at 813-586-1700 to learn more about what we do and to help you with your jobs. Our firm seeks to provide excellent services as we help to identify those candidates with the best qualifications for your open positions. Learn more about how we conduct our sourcing, search for potential hires, and offer support in the hiring process. Find out how our team makes a difference for your firm.