Whether your company is in the midst of a drive of high-volume hiring or on a hiring pause, it’s important to be prepared. Recruiting teams that fail to do the right prep work run the risk of missing out on the best talent. Thankfully, keeping your team ready is doable with the right tools and know-how.
Finding the right candidates will mean lower employee turnover and great productivity. On the other side of the equation, hiring the wrong candidate can mean you are wasting employee resources on a temporary employee.
This is where it gets complicated, As a Recruiter, your team needs to know how to engage candidates, while also streamlining the process to target the best professionals for the position.
When building your talent pipeline, it’s important to develop a full strategy that targets the right candidates. This might include online recruitment initiatives, such as establishing your employer brand and positioning your company as a great place to work through digital channels. Offline recruitment methods might also be beneficial, as employee referrals and events are a great way to meet and engage with candidates in person to leave a lasting impression.
Okay, so how do you actually find top-talent? Here are some sourcing strategies to fill your talent pipeline.
🔥 Focus on your Warm Leads
Just because your company is on a hiring pause doesn’t mean recruiters can’t prepare for the next round of hiring today. This preparation is essential when companies need to keep hard-to-fill positions from remaining vacant for too long.
Warm leads are an excellent source of talent. These potential candidates are uncertain if they wish to stay with their current employer. With the right value proposition, they may well take an offer to work for you instead.
You can nurture these leads by improving your existing sourcing strategies. This means maintaining an appealing employer brand to keep potential candidates attracted to the prospect of working for you. The key to warm leads is to remember that they’re looking for something better than their current positions.
Align with your hiring manager early in the process and as often as possible. You might consider even asking your hiring manager to help you build a list of sourcing channels where your ideal candidates may have a presence. It also helps to build a candidate engagement plan. Consider what you want your candidate's experience to be. Knowing your ideal candidate’s touch points and the desired level of engagement can go a long way to acquiring them as an employee down the line.
🌱 Expand your Candidate Pipelines
Every recruiter knows that finding the right candidate quickly means maintaining an effective candidate pipeline. Maintaining relationships with potential candidates gives you the best chance of hiring the right candidate faster than you would by creating a talent pool out of the blue. That’s why investing in expanding your candidate pipelines is one of the most effective ways to optimize your candidate sourcing.
First focus on your existing pipelines that already working. Utilize applicant tracking software to better track and organize candidates that have interacted with your team before. This makes your pipeline more manageable and enables your team to handle a larger pipeline.
Entice future prospects by building a strong employer brand and always make sure you give candidates feedback (good and bad) so they keep a positive impression of your company.
Next up, explore your options for new candidate pipelines. Connecting with schools and professional associations can help you connect with more job seekers. Not only do these organizations offer pools of qualified candidates to choose from, they often have staff eager to work with your company.
Are candidates ghosting you? Check out these 4 steps that can help keep candidates engaged.
💡 Mitigate Unconscious Bias
Everyone is guilty of unconscious bias. It’s in human nature to judge quickly, and this affects how we think of everyone we meet. However, these unnoticed biases can harm the recruiting process.
Mitigating bias allows you to expand your talent pool and pipelines to qualified candidates that would otherwise slip through the cracks. Standardizing your interviews and creating a consistent hiring process with Qualifi goes a long way towards creating a more diversified workforce with the talent you need.
♻️ Revisit Past Applicants
Revisiting your past applicants offers a pool of candidates that were interested in working for your company. Perhaps they didn’t have the right qualifications for the role they applied for at the time. But new roles may open up, and company needs change.
You can only re-engage past applicants if you have a strong sense of why they didn't make it to 'hired'. Were they over or under qualified? Were they a good fit for a role that's not created yet? Do they have a skillset your business isn't ready to expand into? Yesterday's candidates may be the employees you need tomorrow.
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