Hiring Manager: “I needed these jobs filled yesterday.”
Sourcer: “Right, happy to help” (Facepalm)
When your Recruitment model is in constant reactive mode, how do you implore your Sourcing team to help get you to your desired overall proactive recruitment strategy?
It’s simple, don’t leave your Sourcers underutilized. Sourcers are your front end recruitment subject matter experts and the ultimate source of intelligence for your recruitment game plan. In military terms, Sourcers are your field agents, your boots on the ground human intelligence, there when you need them for all of your confounding recruitment debacles offering insight into many facets of the recruiting life cycle. It is effortless to push Proactive Recruitment Strategy aside when your role as a Sourcer is to fix the fires and offer immediate gratification, but where is the long term solution? By inviting Sourcers with valuable insight to a seat at the table when hiring demand planning and forecasting is occurring, you will be better prepared to hit your hiring goals and will hopefully see a whole lot less red on that next staffing update report you need to present up the chain.
Below, I’ve included six key areas directly impacted by a Source at some point in time in a Corporate Sourcing Team model.
1) Passive Prospect Engagers & Connectors: No one knows how to engage a passive prospect better than someone who does it full time. Sourcers are often your first step in personally reaching out to the passive workforce. Great Sourcers put themselves in the prospect’s shoes from the initial outreach and understand their passive nature enough to know how to best go about hooking them sufficient to flip them from passive to actively considering. Sourcers in a large corporation may also act as Talent Connectors as they address and connect prospects with the hiring representatives that hire their relative skill set, helping address the ever frequent question “But how do my skills fit into your Company?”
If you are looking to connect with the passive talent market, who better to ask advice from than your Sourcer?
2)Talent Market Research: Whether it be heat maps showcasing where your desired talent sits, super advantageous competitor analysis and more, Sourcers can add valuable data points to put you one step ahead. Don’t have a strategy for filling your future needs? Be overly prepared in your next meeting with the decision-makers in having your Sourcer invited to explain the research beyond the numbers.
3)EVP: An experienced Sourcer brands their company and all that goes into their employee value proposition to help entice their prospects to consider a change. As an expert networker, active and easy to connect with on the prime social media channels, your Sourcer being in the know on all aspects of your EVP will make it that much more enticing for a prospect to get interested and flip to an active candidate.
4)Targeted Recruitment Marketing: Keyword being “Targeted.” An experienced fisherman knows just how to lure a catfish versus a bass or trout. The bait will differ depending on what or who in this case, you are trying to hook. Sourcers will know which social platforms, outreach messages, and targeted companies/locations yield the highest ROI for your needs. Thinking of revamping your Job Descriptions? Who better than to ask for insight than a Sourcer who knows exactly what your competitor titles similar talent? If you are wondering how to spend your advertising budget to attract the right candidates, chances are you want multiple Sourcers involved in your brainstorming session.
5)Boolean Master: Automation and Artificial Intelligence is only as good as the search terms you enter to automate. Sourcers help fill the gap by knowing which Booleans need refining and tweaking to yield the desired result/ideal prospect. As the back end of the Recruitment lifecycle becomes more automated and process-driven, the need for human intelligence and ultimate Boolean creators will only increase.
6)New Age and Lean Sourcing Tools: When considering Operational Efficiency, one of the critical areas Sourcers can provide insight is in knowing which new tools, services, and engines are out there for you to consider when aiming to lean your overall process up and stay ahead of your competition.
These six skills by no way exhaust all that your Sourcing team is capable of providing insight on. I would also add that one Sourcer may not be an SME in all 6. However, it is essential to know which Sourcer on your team is passionate and can bring valuable insight into a strategy meeting on any of the above topics.
For all of you numbers lovers, assuming your Sourcer spends 30 of their 40 hours per week sourcing and researching, that is 1560 hours a years’ worth of intelligence bottled up and ready for you to utilize in your proactive hiring strategy. So, what are you waiting for, invite your Sourcing Gurus to the table from the beginning, I promise they’ll surprise you!