Imagine: You have a fully planned week, balancing personal commitments and professional engagements. Amidst your busy schedule, you unexpectedly receive a call from the hiring manager urgently asking to source top talent for the role of finance executive within a week.

How surprising and potentially overwhelming!

Now, picture this – you have a pipeline brimming with top-notch candidates already sourced which you can peek into every time you have a job opening. Instant relief washes over you as you realize the foresight in sourcing top talent is about to make a significant impact.

That sounds relieving!

As you continue managing your busy week, you can confidently assure the hiring manager that you'll present the ideal finance executive. The strength of a well-maintained talent pipeline shines, transforming what could have been a sudden disruption into a seamless recruitment success.

It isn't just a hypothetical situation – it's the reality you create when candidate sourcing is a priority and given careful consideration. Also, you don't have to go looking for what are the best strategies for sourcing top talent at your organization. We have meticulously prepared a list for you!

1. Use Sourcing Software

Hiring managers are starting to lose ground to talent sourcing tools and software, such as the applicant tracking system (ATS), which frequently uses and benefits from algorithms.

By automating job advertising, scheduling, and filtering options, recruiting software can produce successful hiring outcomes.

By screening candidate data from several sources, not simply resumes or applications, certain talent-sourcing software can offer predictive insights.

This is an excellent choice for businesses that are fast-growing and want to streamline their employment process.

2. Use Social Media

Social sourcing is a relatively new concept that is slowly gaining popularity amongst recruiters.

We eat, sleep, and live on social media in the modern world. Honestly, every time you open LinkedIn, you can only see open positions, job descriptions, and recruiters in search of the best applicant for a position.

Organizations have adapted to include social media as part of their talent acquisition and employer branding efforts. Connecting with a hiring manager is now simpler than ever thanks to tools like LinkedIn. In general, it's a reasonably equitable approach to gaining access to talent and opportunities (albeit, biases do come into play).

It's a great way to interact and get a sense of a candidate's profile, way before interviews are done. Tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, and Behance are helpful resources for hiring managers to find passive applicants. These applicants may not be actively seeking employment. But reaching out is now simpler than ever if a recruiter or hiring manager happens to come across their applicant profile.

Undoubtedly, the best and most popular strategy for sourcing candidates is via social media. It has been proven in research that the use of social media in the recruitment process has grown 54 percent in the last five years.

3. Boost your Employer's Brand

Sourcing top talent doesn’t come easier for an organization than it looks. It takes a lot of brains and creativity to maintain a brand reputation that remains consistent and attracts top talent throughout the year.

Whether a candidate responds to your outreach could depend on your employer's brand. If candidates have a negative perception of your employer brand, they will be less likely to respond to your outreach, and an unknown employer brand will also work against you. On the other hand, a strong employer brand is an extremely effective sourcing tool.

4. Set up an Employee Referral Program

You often tend to overlook the goldmine that is sitting right under you.

Yes, employee referral programs are in-house goldmines that are incentive programs for existing employees to tap into their network and refer the best candidate for your organization.

In return, the company gives incentives, gift cards, or bonuses to the employees after they are recruited. This strategy works because the employees have a hidden advantage and they refer only the top candidates from their network. Also, they understand your candidate's requirements and know who can fit into the organization's culture.

You, as a company, can expand your talent pool by 10x by using this approach.

5. Turn to Campus Recruitment for Candidate Sourcing

According to a survey, sourcing top talent from colleges and universities can increase your brand value by 31%. To build a firecracker candidate pipeline, you can collaborate with universities and different campuses to source top talent.

These college freshers are highly skilled and motivated candidates and have a higher level of energy to start their professional careers. So it will be easy to convert them to potential employees quickly and also have the advantage of a fresh candidate pool.

6. Stay in Alignment with the Hiring Manager

You don’t want any discrepancy between you and the hiring manager while sourcing top talent. Align constant communication with the hiring manager about what skill, qualifications, and personality they are looking for in the candidate.

A few tips to do so:

- Plan a kickoff meeting with the hiring manager as soon as you receive a recruitment requirement to iron out the details.
- Prepare a list of job-specific keywords and platforms where you can find such candidates along with the manager.
- Vet a few candidates together with the z to understand their thought processes and what they are looking for.

Don't just stop at one kickoff meeting. Keeping regular contact with the hiring manager to give him updates about the candidate pool and also for confirmation if they are the right fit.

7. Diversify your Sourcing Channels

Most recruiters have their go-to sourcing channels for sourcing top talent. And the majority of them log in to LinkedIn or their personal networks and stop there!

But why? The internet is filled with possibilities. You should consider some less frequent and offbeat channels where the candidates tend to be more receptive to your outreach. In addition, you can also obtain unique details about your candidate from such platforms that will boost your database.

For example, Behance and Dribble can be used if you are looking to hire for your creative team, for techies you can shift to GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Women Who Code and you can peek into Underdog if you are hiring for a startup.

8. Add an ‘Emotional Quotient’ to your Outreach Messages

It is an uphill battle to source top talent and hence you need to think of strategies that will make you stand out from the crowd. On average, 5 to 8% of candidates respond to cold emails, but it can go as high as 30% by crafting personalized messages that help you connect with the candidate emotionally. Here are a few tips for the same.

- Find something common between the candidate and you such as educational background, skillset, connections, geography, or working history to connect with them.
- Emphasize how your company has a great work culture by mentioning your Glassdoor rating and the diversity of your team.
- Think of a catchy and unique subject line to increase the number of candidate responses.

9. Foster your Passive Leads

Sourcing top talent and maintaining passive candidates is never easy. The secret to keeping a strong talent pipeline is to nurture your current candidate database. Regardless of whether you are actively hiring for a position or not, you should always maintain your prospect database.

Keep them informed of new developments at your business, send them birthday and/or anniversary wishes, and make casual contact with them every six months. By nurturing your existing candidate database, you can be confident that when a candidate is ready to change jobs again, they will get in touch with you.

10. Invest in your Company’s Website

It goes without saying that the more attractive, user-friendly, and mobile-compatible your website is, the more traction it will gain.

Work towards building a website that potential candidates can easily navigate through and entice them to work at your organization.

A good career page will represent all the job vacancies at your organization and the website as a whole can paint a picture of your organization’s culture.

You can also spend some time making your application process easier. Make it such that the candidate does not get redirected to other websites and ask them to upload a million documents, this fairly lowers the interest of the applicant.

11. Take the help of Recruitment Marketing

Recruitment marketing is a new-fangled concept where an organization does not go to the talent, but the talent comes to the organization.

But how does this work?

It is not as simple as it sounds.

It takes effort but including recruitment marketing in your talent sourcing strategies will make your job much easier.
Showcase and market your organization by promoting your culture, your diverse team, your benefits and perks for the employees, and what not to attract the candidates who want to work at your organization.

Wrapping Up

Sourcing top talent is not an easy task and with the increasing market and opportunities, it is going to be harder than ever.
You get the gist of how you can strategize to improve your sourcing techniques, but what if I tell you that you can shrug this responsibility off your shoulders and delegate it to people who are best at it?

We at HireQuotient can take all your talent-sourcing pains away and present to you a pool of candidates that are unmissable. Book a demo today!

Also Read,

11 Strategies for Sourcing Top Talent at your Organization