6 Easy Ways to Improve Candidate Sourcing

When marketing your business’s product or service, you wouldn’t rely on a singular channel to reach all of your ideal customers, would you? Hopefully not!

Instead, you likely use paid digital marketing, traditional advertising, email, organic social media, and other methods in order to maximize your reach and attract as many customers as possible. Are you putting that same zest into your recruiting from your candidate source?

When you primarily rely on just one or two channels for candidate sourcing, you miss out on wide swaths of job seekers who are qualified and eager to work. In this post pandemic economy, these blindspots in your candidate sourcing methods are only going to continue to set you back from your competitors. 

When you account for the fact that you’re competing against 15 other businesses tapping into the same candidate source as you are, the stakes become even higher. Before you can begin formulating the best candidate sourcing strategy for your company, it’s important to set some things straight first. 

Candidate vs. applicant

There’s one key difference that you need to understand when it comes to candidates and applicants. In the hiring industry, everyone starts as an applicant before moving onto a candidate. 

Applicants, as you’ve probably suspected, are defined as individuals who submit an application of some sort for employment. Candidates, on the other hand, are what you have once an applicant has been selected to continue in the hiring process. 

Applicant sources can then be more easily defined as channels that job seekers use when searching for a new employer; these are the methods they use to submit applications. Candidate sources are more aligned with existing pools of qualified candidates, such as previous employees or employee referrals.

Sourcing vs. recruiting

Just as there’s a distinct difference between candidates and applicants, there is one between sourcing and recruiting. While these words have been used interchangeably in the hiring space, when you source candidates you access an already existing pool of job seekers. When you recruit, your team members are essentially cold-calling individuals who may or may not be seeking new employment opportunities.

Sourcing candidates is more like recruiting in this sense, while sourcing applicants would be when you post roles on job boards or career sites to funnel applicants to your positions. This dichotomy can be confusing, so for the sake of clarity, it’s important to have a clear understanding. 

What’s the best approach candidate sourcing?

There’s no one size solution to best source candidates who are in high demand. Instead, we suggest having a multi-pronged approach to sourcing applicants when adding to your team.

With all of this in mind, it’s apparent that you need to find creative ways to broaden your business’s reach and stand out amongst the hiring crowd. Here are six easy ways to improve candidate sourcing to add to your strategies today:

1. Career site 

First things first: job seekers who are most interested in working for you will go directly to your website to scope out your open roles. Once they’re there, they want to get a feel for what it’s like to work for you and what’s in it for them if they were hired at your company. This is why having a standalone career site is so important in your efforts to source candidates.

To benefit the most from this candidate source, you need to have a robust career site that not only lists your open roles but also wins applicants over by highlighting perks like benefits, culture, and flexibility. A career site that fulfills all of these criteria is the foundational block needed to access those already  interested in your company. The best part? If crafted correctly, these job descriptions can be the backbone for all of your applicant sourcing efforts on various platforms.

2. Sponsored jobs on Indeed

While it is possible to show up on job boards like Indeed organically, these applicant sources are incredibly crowded. The only way to guarantee that you appear early on in a job seeker’s search results is by sponsoring your job. If you know that your ideal candidate pool spends the most time on these types of sites, it can be worthwhile to spend money to make sure your jobs appear “above the fold.” Plus, you can monitor your sponsored job board spending with an applicant tracking system that directly integrates with Indeed.

Of course, each of these channels is different. One that provides an excellent candidate source of top talent for one business might not be a great source for another. The key is to track the number of eventual hires you drive from each source over time and then tweak your investment on each one accordingly. Optimization allows you to maximize the ROI of your recruiting spend.

For example, let’s say job boards are far and away your top applicant source in terms of volume. But when it comes to actually sourcing applicants you eventually hire, you find that job boards land lower on the list. While it may seem like a good idea to keep pumping money into job boards because they bring in more applicants, it’s often a better idea to shift your resources toward channels like your career site or Jobs on Facebook that prove to have better candidates sources, including higher quality.

Additionally, it’s important to make sure that the applicants you attract across all of these sources are funneled into a single location that houses all candidate information. That way, no applicant falls through the cracks and you can easily locate each applicant’s resume and other details, identify the most qualified folks, and move candidates through your hiring process quickly and efficiently.