Unlocking the Best Way to Source Candidates Efficiently

Recruitment remains a significant challenge for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), with 58% of hiring managers citing talent shortages as a barrier to filling positions. According to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), 67% of recruiters believe that the recruitment process has become more competitive in recent years . In fact, 76% of organizations are actively seeking to improve their hiring processes to attract top talent . With only 20% of active candidates regularly visiting traditional job boards, leveraging social media has become crucial.

Furthermore, referral programs can lead to a 25% increase in employee retention, emphasizing the value of trusted recommendations. Given these statistics, it is essential for SMBs to adapt their recruitment strategies to remain competitive. Partnering with Recruitment Support services can offer cost-effective solutions, enabling businesses to enhance their talent sourcing efforts and navigate this challenging landscape

The recruitment process itself is lengthy and time-consuming, and if you are a small or medium-sized business with restrictions on spending resources, it can be a very tricky job. As a recruiter, your goal is to find and identify the best-suited talents for the open role and then successfully recruit them.

Depending on your recruitment needs, your methods and strategies must be flexible enough to change with changing circumstances. While finding an approach and implementing it is necessary, it is also essential to change the process according to the company’s changing needs.

Sourcing, screening, and hiring are just 3 of the phases of the full-cycle recruiting process, and a full-cycle recruitment process starts with planning the job description. Whatever strategy you choose, the basic needs should be fulfilled. As a recruiter, you should hire faster, better quality candidates at a lower expense. Once your primary concerns are answered and covered, you need to make sure the job description is on point and approach the suitable candidates.

When you are creating the job description, make sure you answer all the common concerns of the candidate.

The job description should mention:

1. The job requirements
2. Regular responsibilities of the role
3. Growth opportunity
4. Details of the team if there are any
5. Available role’s importance and responsibilities within the company

Once your job description is ready, now it’s time for you to be prepared to hire. Before sourcing and interviewing candidates, decide the evaluation criteria. What skills do you want the candidates to have? Do you prefer your candidates to have a certain degree? What interview questions are you going to ask the candidates? On which grounds will you evaluate the candidates? Once you know all the answers, you are ready to source and screen candidates.

Talent sourcing is not a difficult job, but it can be difficult. Sourcing can be tricky when it comes to sourcing top candidates with specific skills. Most of the time, top candidates are not even in the available market. This means they are already hired, and you need to source passive candidates. However, there are various ways sourcing experts use to source the top active and passive candidates. Here are a few of the ways you can source a leading candidate.

Top 3 Methods for Sourcing Candidates

1. Leveraging Social Media:
   

   Only 20% of the active candidates spend time regularly on traditional job boards. The remaining 80% use various social media platforms every day. If you are not talent hunting on social media, you are missing out on a majority of candidates.

   From posting job ads on social media to building brand image, everything helps your process. If you are looking for talents with specific skills such as developing, or creative graphic designing, you can join their communities and engage them in conversations. This is also a great way of sourcing passive candidates. Giving candidates an idea of working with you and sharing honest information will allow the candidates to visualize working with you.

3. Referral Program:
   

   Be it a tour agency or a restaurant, we often ask our friends and family for reviews, and we trust their reviews more than we trust online reviews. The same goes for the job market too. Generally, when candidates working for a company refers another candidate to his company, they make sure they are directing a great candidate and a good friend because nobody wants to refer someone who would further damage their reputation.

   And it’s the same for the candidates. Before choosing a company, they would check for reviews. Who would you believe? Online reviews or your friend who is working in the company? Starting a referral program is a good way of attracting active and passive, trustworthy, vetted candidates.

4. Posting Job Ads:
   

   Posting job ads is the easiest way to attract active candidates. It’s a great option if you need to mass recruit. The job ad should mention the role responsibilities, regular duties, team details if it’s a role with a team, and other obligations. It should also note the requirements, specific skills if needed, and qualification requirements

   Besides these methods, you can also use social sites such as Github or DeviantArt to source candidates with coding or graphic skills. Using job-related sites such as LinkedIn to talk to the candidate directly is also a viable idea. There are various other options available such as candidate sourcing outsourcing through strategic Recruitment Support service providers. Your sourcing strategy should change according to your recruitment needs.

Top 3 Methods for Screening Candidates

The screening comes after you are done with sourcing candidates. There are three methods widely used to screen candidates, and all three of them are essential. Here are the three methods of screening candidates.

1. Resume Screening:

   Resume Screening should not be used as the only screening process. However, it is a vital process when combined with other methods. Resume screening is efficient and consumes less time if done through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). ATS will automatically scan all the critical information and then create a profile for the candidate using the data. ATS allows recruiters to save time and use it to focus on the candidates. Screening resumes manually will take a lot more time and be less effective.

   Make sure you use a large number of valuable keywords. If you don’t, you will miss out on top qualified candidates. At the same time, be very specific about your keywords. Candidates are aware of how ATS works and often stuff their resumes with keywords to get past the ATS.

2. Screening Through Calls:

   Screening through calls can be effective if you ask the right questions. It allows the recruiter to talk directly to the candidate even before entering the interviewing stage. This is a good chance for you to explain the rest of the process to the candidate and ease them into it; simultaneously, you can get to know the candidate better.

   Make sure you ask the relevant questions, and the answers help you in the next round. If you can give ten minutes to each candidate you are screening, the interview stage will be more accessible and enable you to better understand the candidates.

3. Video Interviews:

   Video Interviews are time-consuming, but it is worth every minute. Asking the right questions in the video interviewing process will help your interview process recruit best-fit candidates efficiently. This is your chance to ask the right questions and get to know the candidate better while judging the candidate’s answers to form a more precise impression.

   Make sure you prepare a set of questions and ask the same questions to all the candidates, so it is easier to compare them.

The 7 Best Interview Practices

Effective recruiting requires a face-to-face interview. If you are hiring remotely, this should be replaced with live video interviews. Before jumping into the discussions, there are a few things you need to do. Prepare a set of standard questions for all the candidates. While you interview the candidates, ask them the standard questions, so it is easier to compare them.

However, make sure you ask questions specific to the candidate if you think they have an exciting passion or side projects they are working on. Here are some of the best practices regarding the interview phase.

1. Environment Matters:

   Considering face-to-face interviews generally happen in a quiet place, you should make sure there is no disturbance during the process. This is to ensure your and the candidate’s entire focus is on the interview. Often, even good candidates can get distracted and miss out on things. You don’t want to lose a top-qualified candidate over a moment of distraction.

   Make sure the candidate is comfortable in the environment.

2. Explain How the Interview will Run:

   This shows you care about the candidate and their comfort. Take your time to explain the interview process to the candidate before you begin. Allow them to be comfortable and ask questions if they want to know something.

3. Interviews are a two-way process:

   Of course, you are the one holding most of the cards; however, it goes both ways. You are looking for a perfect fit for the role, while the candidate is looking for an ideal company to work with. Like you want to know the candidate better, the candidate is also curious and might have questions, and make sure they feel comfortable enough to ask them.

4. Know Your Candidate:

   Knowing your candidate is essential. Make sure you know their CV well and try to understand what they are looking for. Knowing your candidate’s CV will give you an edge. Learning about their other accomplishments and achievements through their resumes or background checks shows you pay attention and respect where it is needed.

   This way, you can also check if the candidate is the person they claim to be on paper or not.

5. Be Wise:

   Interviews can end quickly, and it is never enough time to know a candidate completely. Once you have the resume, and the knowledge, make sure you ask the right questions. Besides asking common questions, recruiters should also ask questions specific to the candidates. However, you do not have a lot of time, and making the interview process lengthy will drain you and the candidate both. Ask your questions wisely, and gather data on everything you wanted to know.

6. Judge the Body Language:

   Body language often shows how sincere or committed a person is. Almost 60% of human communications are done through body language. That is more than 50%. You can learn a lot about your candidates by judging their posture, hand movements, and more. You do not need to be an expert, but you can tell who is excited and not.

7. Don’t Scribble, Keep an Extra Hand:

   Don’t bother taking notes and scribbling down everything the candidate says. It is hard to have a productive, informative two-way conversation while you are scribbling down things. Ask for someone’s assistance who could write down the critical notes to compare later on. However, as a recruiter, you should be more focused on the conversation and the candidate in general.

Concluding Thoughts

These are the standard and most effective methods for talent sourcing, screening, and interviewing candidates before hiring them. The recruitment process is lengthy, and it takes a considerable amount of time and resources, and workforce. While big companies can maintain a strong recruiting team and system, small and medium-sized businesses can struggle a lot; however, keeping the best practices will help them in the long run.

If sourcing and screening candidates is a challenge for your agency at present, or if you are keen to scale up your talent sourcing service delivery capacity cost-efficiently, then consider partnering up with QX Global Group, one of the best Recruitment Support Services companies in India, offering candidate sourcing services to staffing firms in the US. Click the button below and get in touch with us today.

Originally published Sep 26, 2024 06:09:30, updated Feb 05 2024

Topics: Candidate Sourcing, Talent Acquisition, Talent Compliance, Talent Management