I was asked to comment on the new wave of recruitment and the rise of talent sourcing in response to highly skilled being spammed on LinkedIn etc – how are recruiters changing their tactics to get people’s attention who are already inundated with (sometimes) unwanted/irrelevant job offers? How are recruiters cutting through the noise to get the best talent?
Here is what I see over the past 15 years in Talent Sourcing:
In the beginning Sourcing was for the nerdy recruiters, the techie ones. Looking for alternatives to find their highly demanded people. After the bubble there came a rapid growth in Tech. But in a different and more collaborative way. Social Media began to rise. The recruiters started to recognise Social Media as database where names + skills/interest and a way to connect were combined. Mostly the techies were the early adopters. Once it became a trusted platform other people in the workforce started using Social media, starting with the highly educated, nowadays all working classes are online.
Now back to Sourcing. Sourcing is one of the recruitment channels next to advertising and referral and an employer brand .
The art of Sourcing and being able to cut through the noise and get the best talent, is to find in the way Sourcing is being done.
High end Sourcers are capable of finding the purple squirrels using different techniques and tools on different platforms thinking of alternative approaches and will never start before they fully understand what the role is about and with whom the candidate will drink coffee inside or outside the office. The first contact will be personal, mentioning triggers read from the profiles that came up in the search on the targeted candidate.
The other Sourcers usually take the job title as what they should go after, run their query in Linkedin and send out mass emails without looking at the profile at all.
The good thing is, over the years, Sourcing was for the smart people, than it became mainstream, Linkedin + junior recruiter = sourcer. Now companies are spending money on training and are hiring experts on sourcing or outsource the sourcing to the experts.
One of the main trends: Sourcers are doing most of the work to get the right people on the doorstep. The recruiter is taking care of the inhouse process, of what is happening in the inbox, getting hiring managers aligned and the interviews go well in order to get the job offer out.
Great sourcing is valuable in the way you want to brand yourself as employer. You only reach out to the people that could help the company now or in the near future.
The feature will also look at employer brand and how that is increasingly playing a vital role in the war for talent – if that’s something you could enlighten me on then I would be over the moon!
What we see is that there is a complete hype regarding Employer Branding. For me you cannot see this separate from your overall brand.
I would advise companies to first look at their corporate brand and implement that in your recruitment and HR cycle.
When your corporate brand is good, this will drip down into your company and will be part of your company values. When that does happen, you don’t need to spend a lot of time nor money on Employer Branding.
It should be part of your overall brand.
Gordon Lokenberg presents 