Category: Recruitment

A good recruitment strategy and recruitment process to attract candidates with top talent for your company requires wit, diligence, and commitment. It also enables you to root out unqualified candidates. Here is a guide on recruitment strategies to help you get top talent for open positions in your organization.

he following hiring strategies will enable you to get the right candidates and hire the best staff during your recruitment process.

Here are the top 10 healthcare recruitment strategies that will enable a successful hiring process, create an excellent impression of your organization, and hire the best healthcare professionals.

Your organization needs top talent, and so you might place job ads from your Tampa office. But merely placing these ads is the first step of the journey. Indeed, some might say this is not the first step but prep work for a long journey ahead. Finding top talent will help your organization transcend to new heights, but the journey is quite arduous. It will come with many challenges in candidate screening, creating candidate pipelines, and finally, conducting the selection process.

If you are looking to optimize your search results in Tampa, FL, and surrounding areas, make sure to work with an effective firm like the Velocity Resource Group in Tampa, FL today. We use several sourcing channels, a human touch, effective data mining, and more in Tampa, FL, to present exactly what you need in the hiring process.

The Need for a Single Vision and More Streamlined Human Resources Process in Tampa, FL

For every job opportunity published, there are over one hundred candidates available. Although the more, the merrier seems plausible; it’s a barrier to recruiters as sourcing the most qualified candidate becomes difficult. Choosing one from a thousand applicants is tedious, pointless, time-draining, and often leaves you choosing the wrong applicant.

This can be an issue for hiring managers and the general talent acquisition process. At the same time, it will certainly have knock-on effects within the organization as less qualified candidates can slowly lower the overall caliber of the organization.

To check your boxes faster, here are some of the most trusted ways thousands of recruiters have used when sourcing the best candidates—you should too. If you are looking for more assistance in candidate sourcing and talent acquisition, reach out to the Velocity Resource Group.

Our clients reach out to our help with their recruitment process and bring about talented candidates. They rely on our trusted sourcing process that includes sourcing, qualification, and vetting the client before presenting quality candidates to your firm.

We work with active and passive candidates to present superior candidate experience and provide effective candidate sourcing.

Candidate Sourcing for Qualified Talent

What are the different tactics or plans you should use when improving your hiring process in Tampa, FL? Here are a few steps to obtaining top talent.

Plan your strategy for sourcing candidates

Before any outsourcing steps or execution is done, create a plan by identifying the candidates you are looking for before starting your search. Here are a few tips for doing so:

i) Analyze job requirements

Check out everything you may require for the positions you are sourcing candidates for. This will help you streamline your search for certain skills and qualities that prospective candidates may have.

ii) Build your candidate persona 

This is done by creating a persona that fits the requirements you have in mind, then checking to see if your prospective candidates fit the persona that you have created.

iii) Make sure you have considered all relevant job titles then, create and search strings

Choose the titles, skills, experience, locations, and terms to include (or exclude) in your search string.

Start your search with your database

What database? You may think. There is a huge mine of untapped potential that you may not be aware of in the form of candidates from previous recruitment exercises. Sure, these candidates did not meet the cut for the jobs they applied for, but it does not mean that a certain percentage of them are not good fits for other positions in your company. 

You have to look over their files and contact them for an interview, thereby saving time, effort, and money. 

Be careful when judging social profiles and resumes.

It is easy to be very judgmental when looking at candidates’ social profiles and resumes. Some of these supposed unqualified candidates, passive candidates, do not regularly update their resumes or work profiles, which allows you to miss out on sourcing these gems.

Fortunately, you can use your knowledge and experience to glean insights from the social profiles of passive candidates. Here’s an example of how this would work:

From your experience, you know that a typical VP Sales candidate with 3 years of work experience has certain skills. We know that responsibilities develop further as one progresses within a specific industry; as such, we can glean that the individual should have certain skills that employers desire. While this candidate you have just found may not have those skills listed on their profile, they likely have all or most skills that would make them a good fit for the position.

Go beyond basic searches.

Stop using generic or basic terms to search for these candidates. Go deeper by including words that describe the candidate’s responsibilities in your searches. It will bring out better options and better candidates. A recruiter at the Velocity Group will want to understand the quality level of the talent, pore through qualifications, and understand other activities, expertise, and more to obtain more qualified candidates.

Use the right technology.

Using the right technology can help identify the right candidate, manage the database of candidates you have and even help you source those candidates.

Build a sourcing pipeline in Tampa

When sourcing candidates, don’t overlook every candidate who is not a good fit for the role you are recruiting candidates for. Keep an eye out for candidates that would match your future hiring roles. Such candidates probably match your ideal candidate personas but fall short due to some circumstances such as lack of adequate experience or no opening for their position in your company.

Create a relationship with these candidates so that you can add them to your sourcing pipeline; hence, you can pick them out when you need them.

Work with the Velocity Resource Group for Effective Sourcing in Your Industry

Too stressful? A better way?

All these processes for a candidate? The tips mentioned above are what most recruiters use in sourcing the best candidates, but more effective recruiters will be more comprehensive. This means you no longer have to pass through the long process of searching, selecting, and interviewing when another can perform all. The ideal partner will help you move forward without the above stress and eventually present you with the ideal candidate.

At Velocity Resource Group, we are the better way. We source for your ideal candidates by identifying the exact categories of candidates—we do this by creating a list of potential candidates in a database. We collate the database and scrutinize the best from the rest. These selected individuals are the chosen candidates that fit exactly your requirements.

We collate the qualified candidates and present them to you, highlighting their strengths without leaving their corresponding weaknesses. Our team will allow you to choose from this list and proffer advice on which candidate is ideal.

In essence, we will source the candidate, we will qualify the candidate, and finally, we will present the shortlist of candidates for you to hire. We are there for you when you have a limited time, a limited budget, and a limited talent pool. Our goal is to make sure we offer qualified, available, and interested candidates quickly.

Contact us today for your recruiting and talent needs in your industry.

Talent acquisition is a term widely used in job recruitment circles. It is the process by which companies seek out and employ individuals who have the skills and mindset to meet the needs of their organization. 

Talent acquisition is not the same as job recruitment, although the terms are often used interchangeably. 

Recruitment is merely just about filling vacancies. Talent acquisition, on the other hand, is much broader, going beyond just filling vacant positions. It’s an intricate process that entails future resource planning and allocation to prioritize the diversification of its labor force. 

How Talent Acquisition Works

Talent acquisition specialists identify, assess and employ candidates to create a robust talent pipeline. They utilize a series of strategies that help key decision-makers and managers determine valuable talent.

These specialists may come from a company’s HR organization or a candidate sourcing company. However, the work process cuts across regardless. Let’s walk you through the key stages of a talent acquisition exercise.

Generating Leads

The first step in the talent acquisition process is lead generation. This proactive recruitment approach targets potential candidates by getting them interested in open positions at the company. In simple terms, you generate their interest so that they can consider you as a suitable hiring manager. Job ads and a job alert are a few ways we use to generate leads by combining relevance and employer bids.

Attracting the Best Candidates

At this juncture, the talent acquisition team focuses on the company’s recruitment initiatives and values, identifying candidates most suitable to the company brand and the employer’s needs. 

Candidates also get to learn about the company culture, business strategy, and the products and financial services it offers in the market. They also learn about competitors and how the company differentiates itself as unique.

Interviewing And Assessing Candidates

Once qualified candidates have applied and the best candidates are identified, interviews and assessments can begin. The competency of candidates is tested by a senior talent acquisition specialist at this stage of the process. 

Do they have the skills to be helpful to the company? If not, can they learn them? Can they work with others to achieve the company goals? Will they be a good fit in the workplace dynamic, or would they disrupt the flow? Do they fit the job description?

This part of the talent acquisition process is quite intensive as the employer needs to be sure that they are going after the right people. 

Evaluating Candidate References

Evaluating references is a crucial part of the pre-employment screening. It’s a reliable way to discover strengths and weaknesses, leadership ability, managerial skills, and even the personality of the jobseekers. It always helps to gather any useful information about the qualified applicants.

Selecting The Best Candidates

Selection should never be a rushed process. At this stage in the talent acquisition process, the team chooses candidates they feel have the most outstanding aptitude for employment by that company or organization. Sometimes there is a second round of interviews, assessments, and evaluations before the best candidates get selected.

Hiring and Onboarding

Once the best candidates are selected, they are formally hired, and the process of onboarding begins. Onboarding gives new employees the resources and information they need to become productive at the workplace. They get integrated into the culture and vision of the organization so they can understand their role in the company.

Some Tips For More Effective Talent Acquisition Jobs

Good communication, having a clear goal in mind, and working together to achieve it are just some of the most basic ways to improve talent acquisition. When the team knows exactly what they want and how to get it, the process works much better, and the quality of candidates absorbed by the company is much higher. 

That said, here are some more tips to improve the talent acquisition process:

Don’t Be Too Rigid

Candidates should not get evaluated on skills and experience alone. While these are essential factors, sometimes candidates should be assessed more on their potential than their achievements. 

Most candidates who perform poorly at the workplace do so not because of a lack of knowledge or experience (one can always learn these with time), but rather a lack of aptitude to do the job. Focusing on hard skills as the main criteria for long-term employment is an outdated way of thinking.

Take Your Time

Rushing things makes for a shoddy process, opening the door to mistakes which end with the recruitment of poor-quality candidates.  

You do not want to cut corners with talent acquisition as it can compromise the pool of candidates. It’s much better to take your time scrutinizing individuals rather than rushing through the process to save money or time. Employing the right people saves the organization more resources in the future than shortcuts ever will.

Practice Effective Collaboration

Talent acquisition specialists work as a team, so collaboration is vital between specialists and the company’s HR department. Remember that talent acquisition is not about filling vacant positions but finding individuals that will fit into the mold of the company brand and culture for the long term. 

You must align the goals of your team together with that of the organization.

Come Up With a Pipeline for Candidates

Organizations have different cultures and approaches to how they conduct their business. This means that they have different ways of sourcing talent. But every candidate sourcing company should have a strategy aimed at producing the best candidates for the organization. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of spontaneity, but making things up as you go along is something you must avoid at all costs.

Hire a Suitable Talent Acquisition Partner Today

Talent acquisition is an intensive process involving several aspects. While some larger companies have in-house talent acquisition specialists, this is not the case for everyone. In such a scenario, it is prudent to seek the services of a candidate sourcing company like Velocity Resource Group to help your organization get the best available candidates. 

At Velocity Resource Group, we use highly effective hiring strategies to help our clients find the best talent available. We have set a high standard for ourselves by observing high compliance in our corporate hiring initiatives and employer branding practices. 

Most importantly, our talent acquisition specialist will work hard to understand the organization’s needs to identify the best possible candidates from the get-go.  Get in touch with us by giving us a call on 813-586-1700, so we become your talent acquisition partner today can help you to assess, interview, track, and recruit potential job candidates for your company.

If you’re in charge of making your company’s hiring decisions, you must know how important a good candidate sourcing strategy is. Having the right talent in the company is integral to its growth and success. As a recruitment decision-maker, it is your job to make sure all the available positions in the company are filled with qualified candidates in good time.

That said, getting good candidates to fill vacancies in your organization is not usually easy or time-efficient. That’s why you need what is known as a talent pipeline. 

What Is a Talent Pipeline? 

It is a carefully chosen pool of potential new hires that a company has in anticipation of future positions or roles. Simply put, it’s a list of actively and passively searching candidates who you’ve already examined and qualified as fit for particular positions. Think of it as a waiting list where candidates wait for vacancies to arise before they’re hired. 

Why Do Companies Need Talent Pipeline? 

So, why do you need a sustainable talent pipeline rather than just hiring employees when the actual vacancies come up? Well, there are a couple of benefits of developing and maintaining a talent pipeline. Some of these include:

Saves You Time When Hiring

Perhaps the most significant benefit of having it is just how fast you can get vacancies filled. That’s because you’ll already have done most of the searching and assessment beforehand. So, when it’s time to hire, you’ll only need to confirm candidate availability and put together an offer. 

Allows You to Cast a Wider Net 

Building a talent pipeline is a comprehensive process that involves sourcing potential hires from multiple sources so that you can create a stronger, diverse, and highly-qualified workforce.

Gives You the Best Chance of Hiring Top Candidates 

Having a talent pipeline also helps you avoid the last-minute rush to fill vacancies. It will protect you from making rushed, poorly informed hiring decisions. 

Promotes Positive Candidate Experience

The engagement, nurturing process, and hands-on nature of a talent pipeline help provide a better experience for the candidates. This way, the potential hires will better understand the role’s requirements, engage with you on their terms, and have a generally positive outlook of the company. So, it gets you ahead of local employers.

How to Build a Strong and Effective Talent Pipeline in Tampa, FL

Building a talent pipeline strategy for your company is pretty straightforward. Here are five key steps you should follow: 

Assess the Company’s Current and Future Needs

The first step of creating a talent pipeline is to figure out the organization’s current and foreseeable talent needs. You can do this by looking at the company’s short-term and long-term goals and assessing the roles and skills that are likely to arise.

For example, if your company is planning to open a new branch next year, you need to figure out in advance what roles you think will need filling. You can also check if there is a skills gap that may prompt hiring soon. 

Identify Your Talent Sources

The next step is figuring out your talent sources. Talent sources are the channels you use to get candidates. Here are some of the talent sources you can consider:

• Referrals from existing employees
• Your website’s career page
• Social networks such as LinkedIn
• Networking events in Tampa Bay
• Recruitment databases like career source

Develop a Talent Persona

The next step in creating an excellent talent pipeline strategy is to build a talent persona. A talent persona is a description of the ideal candidate for a particular role. To do this, you will need to conduct a comprehensive technical and job fitment analysis. This means that you will need to assess the fitment of your talent pool for the jobs you are offering. The ideal candidate should possess both the technical skills, professional experience, and personality traits matching the vacancy and your company.

If you want to go beyond the conventional matching of candidate resumes with available vacancies, consider a detailed approach by ensuring that your sourcing strategy factors in the more technical aspects.  Examples of these technological aspects include:

• frequency of keywords
• keyword relevancy matching
• geocode location mapping
• among other means of analysis

You can leverage advanced algorithms to map candidates’ personality traits to job descriptions to identify applicant fitment in team engagement, resilience, and work-from-home abilities. The idea is to develop a detailed talent persona to ensure that you match your candidates with jobs that they are best suited for both professionally and in terms of personality.

Reach Out to Qualified Candidates in Tampa, FL

Once you’re done with creating a candidate persona, it’s time to connect with qualified candidates. Whether on social media, in-person, or portfolio websites, make sure you initiate communication with prospective talent, even if they’re not actively searching. This initial contact is about getting the candidates’ attention seeing as they might never have heard about your company before.

That said, you want to limit your contact to candidates you feel can bridge your company’s skills gap. 

Invest in Workforce Development 

To create an effective talent pipeline strategy, you need to think beyond simply sourcing candidates. After hiring applicants from within the pipeline, it is best to ensure that you nurture them continually via relevant training programs. 

When you invest in talent development, you equip your employees with the knowledge to ensure the company runs smoothly. Besides, training your workers motivates them to perform better and contributes to employee retention by enhancing engagement and satisfaction.

Want to Build or Expand Your Talent Pipeline? We Source and Qualify the Right Candidates for You!

If you don’t have the talent pipeline, you’ve come to the right place. Velocity Resource Group is your answer to all your candidate sourcing troubles in Tampa, Florida. 

We save hiring managers the time, energy, and expenses associated with hiring the wrong candidates by creating valuable talent pipelines for them. Our professional talent pipeline management team is ready to help you source qualified candidates even if you have limited time, budget, or tools. 

Feel free to give us a call today on 813-586-1700, so we can discuss more on your talent pipeline strategy. 

When it comes to finding the right person for the right position at your company or firm, it is much more complicated than simply sifting through resumes until you find a match. The job itself is a key element to the type of advertising you will do to fill the position and how long you plan to keep that newly acquired employee.

At Velocity Resource Group, we understand how critical it can be for hiring managers to find the right people for the job openings that your business has. It can be the difference between a long-term employee and a high turnover rate. This can seriously affect your productivity and revenue stream, so getting the acquisition part done effectively and efficiently is essential.

One of the first things that hiring managers and others involved in the hiring process should be aware of is the difference between recruitment and talent acquisition. These two terms seem to many to be interchangeable, but they are quite different and will yield different results for the jobs to be filled.

Recruitment vs. Talent Acquisition

The primary difference between recruitment and talent acquisition is the type of job that will be filled and the special skills needed to perform the duties of that position.

Recruitment, to put it simply, is focused on filling vacancies in your company. Recruitment is the way to go when you have a current position open that needs to be filled as quickly as possible. You can use general-purpose job search sites, and you can pretty easily find many candidates who will match the job parameters.

Talent acquisition jobs are much more difficult to fill because they take more time and research to find the exact right candidate for the position. Talent acquisition focuses on filling positions that will become a long-lasting part of the company. These positions help the company meet its long-term goals in the business world and hopefully have a low turnover rate.

The talent acquisition process can also be ongoing because a company should always look for the brightest and the best talent available in new and innovative areas from which your company could benefit immensely. Finding the best in Tampa, Fl, or around the country may take more than an online applicant tracking system. Networking and building relationships with a potential partner in the future is also a big part of the talent acquisition process and shows that your company is thinking about the future rather than simply working at the moment.

Recruitment Jobs

Recruitment jobs are typically not going to be long-lasting careers for the employees who are hired and include a fairly basic job description. Positions at the entry-level for hospitality, food service, retail, and others would be considered recruitment jobs. They generally do not require any specialized training – that can be done on the job – and may not be the final chapter of someone’s career. The turnover rate is usually quite high.

Talent Acquisition Jobs

Jobs that require the hunt for qualified candidates amongst a relatively small pool of top talent are generally known as talent acquisition positions. They take time and effort to find the right people to handle the key responsibilities of these positions. It may also be helpful to invest in a talent acquisition specialist in Tampa, FL, to assist with employer bids and finding the talent your company needs.

These positions are beneficial to the employee you have the top talent and the company and its long-term goals. Looking to the future of the business, talent acquisition jobs should be able to fulfill a specific need in the company that another candidate cannot quickly replace without a good deal of work.

Descriptions in Tampa, FL, Job Ads are Critical

The job description used in the ads for the positions you need to fill is critical because it tells the candidates whether or not this will be a long-term position. A good job ad will help to ensure successful execution of the position’s duties, competitive intelligence of the candidates, and easy risk management for the possible candidates who apply. While you always need to be an equal opportunity employer in Tampa, FL, the job ad can help make the difference in who applies and who does not. 

Suppose you have a recruiting partner such as Velocity Resource Group in Tampa, FL, helping to find you the best candidates through exceptional job ads. In that case, you can guarantee that your company will continue to succeed in the long-term with great employees.

Contact Us to be Your Talent Acquisition Partner in Tampa, FL

If you are a company in Tampa, FL, or the surrounding areas and looking for a sourcing group to help you search for highly qualified candidates, Velocity Resource Group can help. Our experts understand the difficulties of getting potential candidates for jobs through human resources but not hiring anyone. We are here to share our sourcing strategies with your company and be your regional recruiter when needed.

At Velocity Resource Group in Tampa, FL, we have specialized experience finding job candidates at every level and in almost every industry you can think of. They range from healthcare to life sciences, hospitality to manufacturing, and many more. Our primary purpose is to work closely with you to help you find the ideal candidate who will make your company continue to succeed in Tampa, FL.

Contact us today at 813-586-1700 to learn more about investing in us as your on-demand recruiting partner or to take advantage of our free consultation. We can assist with resume sourcing job alerts and applicant reviews, high-touch candidate screening, and creating a positive candidate experience.

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!