Digital Sourcing: This Is What Every Employer Must Do to Recruit Talent

In the world of disruptive technologies today, the old ways of sourcing talent is a passé. Companies no longer look at just the CV to assess the potential of a candidate. Their digital sourcing strategy plays a big role in determining the success of the recruitment process.

The traditional ways of recruiting involved either posting a job in a newspaper or advertising them on open job boards. But in the last decade, new tools and technologies sprung up, which opened a whole new world of recruiting via many different sourcing channels. One now needs digital ads and revolutionary recruiting campaigns to attract the tech-savvy millennials.

A successful digital sourcing strategy needs the talent leaders to employ multiple online recruiting channels to optimize the recruitment process. Social media is most definitely one of the best channels to engage a wide range of prospects. There is Facebook, Twitter, TweetMyJob, blogs, YouTube, and many other niche forums to attract a pool of talent.

Companies need to set themselves apart for top talent to gravitate towards them. And for that — irrespective of the sourcing channel — a few crucial things to consider would be:

• Employer brand – Back in 2016, emotive marketing had taken the industry by storm. Emotive marketing means evoking intense emotions or instant gratification in consumers to buy their product. Recruitment services are effectively using the same strategy. By developing an impressive employer brand that showcases the company’s culture and brand identity, businesses can foster an emotional connection between brand and candidate. A great EVP (employee value proposition) helps tremendously in highlighting the company’s workplace culture and plays a vital role in hiring the right people.

• Candidate experience – We know that today’s world is highly connected and one wrong step can lead to a bad reputation. Hence, candidate experience during the recruitment process is a valuable source which can be feedback for your employer brand. A recruitment strategy should be highly engaging as well as personalized to deliver an enhanced candidate experience. If you do not have an active communication line, you might end up losing the right candidates for your job. A recruitment process is not just about brains, but it is also about the heart. That heart is the candidate experience, and a great experience can prove to be an invaluable means for evoking the right perception of your brand within the talent community.

• Digital Marketing channels– Many times, right candidates are looking at the wrong places to find a job of their liking, and high-performing talent organizations are looking at places where they do not find the right talent. It implies that candidates and employers are hiding from each other. A survey was conducted by Allegis, where respondents had to rate the various digital venues of sourcing in terms of effectiveness.

The venues included employer’s website, search engine marketing, mobile applications, email marketing, job boards, etc. The results showed that there is a 67% more likelihood of a high-performing talent organization to rate a channel as very effective than their peers. In another survey, it was concluded that 71% of talent organizations found referral programs very effective, while only 18% of candidates preferred using them majorly. Even social media has been rated differently, with 59% of high performers finding it very effective and only 22% of candidates using them.

With such vast differences in the candidate usage and talent organization ratings, one thing that both seem to agree upon is the effectiveness of recruitment firms. In this respect, 59% of talent organizations found recruitment firms very effective, and 45% of candidates expressed high usage of them.

The power of the internet and smartphones has made it possible for companies to reach out far and wide. Although there are portals like Aasaanjobs to target professional candidates, companies are also using other means like Google Adwords to source talent. Though the majority of these sourcing channels lead to critical talent, it is up to the recruitment organization how they prioritize these channels and track the ROI on the various sourcing channels.