What Is Talent Sourcing? Definition, Strategy, Process

The future of your organization is dependent on attracting the right talent. As part of your talent sourcing activities, you develop a talent pipeline that increases the chances of hiring the best candidate for future growth.

Hiring the wrong candidate impacts your company culture and wastes resources on an employee who may turn out to be temporary.

This is a complicated process because the recruitment team must engage the right candidates.

They must also streamline the process to target the right professionals for a job. In building a talent pipeline, you develop a full-proof strategy where the right candidates are chosen.

Talent Sourcing Definition

The talent process is the process of searching for actively qualified candidates. Through this process, your team can engage with prospective candidates who can be moved to the talent pipeline and fill current as well as future positions.

These types of outreach recruitment examples include building a brand for an employee who understands the benefits of working with your company.

Talent recruitment attracts a large pool of candidates. This talent pool may include active or passive candidates unaware of your company or the open opportunities without candidate sourcing initiatives. This is part of your talent pipeline that would enable you to find the right candidates.

What Is The Difference Between Recruiting, Acquisition, And Sourcing?

Sourcing is the process of finding suitable candidates for a given job role. Yes, the role does not have to be available or need to exist, and when sourcing is carried out, an organization searches for passive candidates.

Recruitment is the process of screening candidates and figuring out whether they are the perfect fit for an organization or not. Recruitment is not about finding willing candidates.

On the other hand, talent acquisition is an ongoing strategy to find leaders or executives for your company. Moreover, the focus is on long-term human resource planning and finding appropriate candidates that require a specific skill set.

What Are The Talent Sourcing Process?

This is often more cynical than a linear progression of events. You may consider the process of talent management as acknowledging the need to fill the gap and optimise the traits, etc. Below is an overview of the talent-sourcing process.

Planning

Any process is likely to have a set outcome, and planning turns out to be the first step in the talent-sourcing process.

It is all about identifying the areas where gaps lie, like human capital management, formulating job descriptions for the necessary roles to help in sourcing, and selecting strategies for retaining a competitive workforce.

Attracting

Based on the plan, the next stage would be determining whether the talent requirements should be filled within the organization or from external sources.

Whichever process you follow, it has to attract a suitable number of candidates, and some of the external portals include social networks, job portals, etc.

Selecting

The process involves numerous checks and tests to find the right candidate for the job. In simple terms, he is an ideal person for the right job in the organization.

Written tests, group discussions, or psychometric tests are all part of the procedures. In modern times, recruiters may use software and AI-based solutions to skim a population to find the right CVs for the perfect job.

Developing

A number of organizations operate on the idea of training and hiring employees. This would make sense since you want a predisposition toward certain skill sets.

The process starts with an effective onboarding program that helps an employee settle into a new role and is followed by ample opportunities for enhancing their skills while enabling growth through counseling, mentoring, or job rotation schemes.

Retaining

For any organization to be successful, sustaining talent has to be done in an effective way. Most of them try to retain the best talent through increments or promotions, providing opportunities for growth and encouraging involvement in decision-making or special projects.

This is training for evolving roles and rewards through recognition programs.

Transition

Effective talent management will focus on the collective transformation and evolution of an organization through the growth of individual employees.

This would give employees the impression that they are a part of something larger. Exit interviews, retirement benefits, and involvement in succession planning may appear to be unrelated career points, but they are all transition tools.

Strategies And Best Practices For Sourcing Talent

How are you going to find the best talent? The below-mentioned candidate sourcing strategies will fill your funnel with the right candidates.

Maintaining Communication with Hiring Manager in Candidate Selection Process

It is better to align with your hiring managers early and often so they know about the strong candidate and what they look like. This is one of the best ways to source a candidate.

There are some ways to increase the quality of communication and be on the same page. When you receive a requisition, you should research the position and align it with the required qualifications.

Do not stop at the kick-off meeting. During the recruitment process, keep in constant touch with your manager to check on the quantity and quality of the candidates.

Sourcing candidates is the best first step.

If you are devoting time to searching for qualified candidates, you will not end up with a hire, as you will have candidates who are trained for future roles.

However, for many of the candidates, re-engaging them is a missed opportunity. Utilise the team’s efforts by beginning each search with candidates in whom your team has already invested time.

For talent recruitment, engaging the candidates is a vital cog in the wheel in terms of your recruitment strategy.

It will build your brand to entice prospects and open up opportunities for candidates who are not hired but turn out to be good hires in the future.

Diversify the online sourcing channels.

Most recruiters do not have the go-to channels for finding candidates.

A few turn to the professional network, and others say they refer to social media channels. These are the most common sourcing methods, but there are a few other methods you can choose from.

What are the things that you need to look for? The internet has many opportunities, and the key is to understand the audience so that you can predict better.

Incorporate different offline recruitment methods.

There is no doubt that online channels increase your engagement levels. Offline recruitment methods are still a powerful source.

Going offline and meeting people face-to-face is a viable option for sourcing candidates.

You may attend job- or industry-specific seminars, or you may host your events to meet people.

There will be less competition for standing out among the people, and candidates are more likely to respond to people with whom you may have a personal conversation.

Utilizing the network of employees to source candidates

The talent pool can be expanded if you recruit through employee networks. Run candidate sourcing sessions with your team to figure out which members of every employee network would be a good fit for the roles.

The employees can help you tap the untapped talent and enhance response rates from candidates they know.

Once you find a qualified candidate, you may request an introduction from your employee rather than sending out a cold email to facilitate a response rate.

Recruiting candidates for positions that have not yet been posted

Advanced recruiters are known to become proactive with their recruiting efforts and are ahead of the roles that they will need in the future. It is better that you take a close look at your business growth plans.

Then you need to build a corresponding workplace strategy to sustain the vision and the cost model of the company.

Then you need to aggregate those skills and the things that you know about the company or the team culture that are important when it comes to handling specific roles.

The outreach messages have to be perfected for candidate sourcing.

You may have worked hard to source the right candidates, but it is not going to work if they are not going to engage with you. View it as a form of superior customer service that you are expected to provide to your clients.

Outreach recruiting examples may include a few basic tips that are going to make your message more candidate-friendly.

Your message targets the goals of the candidate and not the company. It is going to turn the tables on traditional hiring methods and ensure that talent is a priority.

Develop a strong employee brand.

The employee brand is the difference between a candidate responding to your outreach and ignoring it.

The candidates are not likely to respond to a brand if they have a negative view of it.
On the other hand, a strong candidate is expected to have an exclusive talent pool.
of them would be willing to leave their current jobs if a well-known brand offered them a corporate position.

Get in touch with candidates who do not respond.

After the first round of research and follow-ups, you would like to keep in touch with candidates who were not willing to make a move when you approached them. A golden rule to follow is to wait six months before getting in touch with the candidate.

You can send company news to candidates, wish them a happy birthday, and keep in touch with them in other ways.

Even if the check-ins do not yield noteworthy results, you would want to be on top of the candidate’s mind when it comes to any move.

Using the right tool

Managing all the data and figures on an Excel sheet may be too much, and the sad part is that this is the thing that most recruiters do up until this juncture.

The key is to use the right tools, which will significantly speed up the process.

Conclusion

The best candidates are in high demand, so it is necessary that you adopt a strategic outlook if you are looking to win them for your team.

When the competition for top-tier talent is fierce, you must go out and find the candidates you require.

Such candidate sourcing strategies are going to help you fill the pipeline so that you can choose the best hire for your team.