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Navigating the Maze of the Candidate Sourcing Process

woman_in_maze_yoh_blog.jpgIn the never-ending quest for great talent, getting noticed by the best candidate is only a small portion of the battle. To win the war for talent, you must first stop and seek to truly understand how to maintain a happy and fruitful talent pipeline for your organization.

Hiring is not a quick and easy task anymore, in fact, according to the Glassdoor, the average hiring process takes 23 days. That is a long time in which to lose the perfect candidate. Especially when considering that your organization has taken significant resources and man hours to build that initial relationship, make a good impression, and maintain communication through the various stages of sourcing and interviewing. The quickest way to drop all of those juggling balls is to have a complicated back-end sourcing process.

If you find yourself hitting dead ends and blind alleys while navigating through your hiring process, it's time to take control. Finding and fixing the bottlenecks that are impeding your process isn’t as difficult as you may think. Here are four ways to reign in cumbersome sourcing and hiring processes.

Fill Your Talent Pipeline

Sourcing candidates is a constant process that shouldn't only start once the job order is received. Pursue quality passive candidates and make great candidates feel important and engaged as they cross your desk. If there is a candidate that interviewed for a job but wasn't a great fit for one particular position, still treat them like you did prior to the interview process. Have them walk away with a good impression of the company, even if they weren't awarded the job.

By doing so, you not only maintain a quality outlook of your overall employment brand, but ensure they will be more likely to come back for a future opportunity that may be perfect for. Glassdoor reports 84 percent of candidates would consider leaving their current company if another company with an excellent reputation offered them a job.

On top of that, continue to assess internal candidates while running campaigns to engage with external talent. Collect recruiting data from these efforts and analyze it to develop your search criteria. This can greatly improve your success rate for finding the talent that your company needs. It also acknowledges the native talent already found at your company and engenders feelings of loyalty, recognition and career advancement amongst this group.


Optimize Your Ordering Process

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a bad hire costs a business 30% to 200% of that worker’s annual salary. Whether you are in Human Resources or Talent Acquisition, if you do not have a process set up to evaluate and optimize job orders - especially when they come in at high volumes - you are wasting your and any potential candidate's time. You won't be able to properly pluck from the robust pipeline that you worked so hard to build.

So think about what you need to know to fill that order. Make a checklist and establish a process for you and your team to quickly and efficiently evaluate the orders coming through. The less time you spend deciphering the position, the more time you have to find the correctly-matched candidate.


Find the Right Technology for Your Sourcing Needs

There are so many HR technologies to help you cut the time-to-hire in half. A good starting point is to evaluate the effectiveness of your existing applicant tracking system (ATS). As mentioned above, the only way to measure the effectiveness of your talent acquisition strategy is to have the data at your fingertips. That can be easily obtained with a good ATS.

As sourcing strategies become more sophisticated, so does the technology. There's now voice recognition technology that is being used to source jobs for call centers and various data analytics tools that can provide information to analyze your job pools by industry and location.

In summary, be sure to optimize and organize your sourcing processes and technologies. According to Jobaline, recruiters and field operations have saved 407,000 hours thanks to automated screening and by not spending their time looking at non-local or unfit candidates. If your team isn't researching and using the software that is available to them, they are wasting valuable time and effort that they can be using to lock in that high-quality talent.


Centralized Recruiter Processes and Training

In order to source the best candidates, having a centralized strategy for your recruiters to follow is one of the most effective ways to produce quality results. It's not only a great method for recruiters to establish and share best practices and recommendations, but it also fosters an environment of collaboration for your recruiters to work with; as opposed to pitting people against one another. According to Clear Company, 39% of employees believe that their own organizations don’t collaborate enough. This company-wide collaboration will make for happier recruiters who can quickly fill your talent pipelines and help your sourcing and recruiting process work together like a well-oiled machine.

 

The sourcing and hiring process doesn't need to be a dizzying array of twists and turns to produce high-quality talent for your organization. As you can see above, pinpointing ways to optimize and collaborate on sourcing efforts across your organization will have lasting effects on how fast it takes you to build a successful candidate hiring process.

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About the Author Catherine Rary serves as the Vice President of Enterprise Solutions Sales and is responsible for new RPO account development at Yoh. Prior to this role Catherine has served as a leader in the staffing industry for over 25 years.  Catherine has holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business and Marketing from the University of Alabama.

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