Ready for new trends in recruiting instruments? Or still posting & praying?

Why Active Sourcing should be part of your recruitment strategy

The standard recruiting process means posting your vacancies on different job platforms and waiting for candidates to apply. While job postings are still seen as the most important recruiting instrument by companies, Active Search is only used by less than every 5th company to fill their vacancies.**

However, considering the current labour market and the shortage of skilled workers, this strategy is risky. Either positions are too slow to be filled – or not at all filled, leading to serious business risk or holding back company growth.

Active Sourcing is one modern recruiting instrument, that is turning the tables: you are applying to the candidates. This means that you actively search for potentially interested candidates for your vacancy, for example on business portals such as LinkedIn, and then contact them directly.

This truely works, as statistics on recruiting trends* show: about one in ten vacancies are nowadays filled by Active Search.

Active Sourcing can do even more for you when it comes to finding employees

Active Sourcing also helps to fill positions in the long term. It allows potential employees to learn about you company, get interested and maintain that interest your business if it is done “properly”. Also it reaches the passive candidate market, i.e. those people who are not actively looking for a new job but just like to keep themselves informed about the job market.

Active Sourcing therefore can offer you as employer the following benefits:

• Reduction of time-to-hire
• Faster response to personnel shortages due to talent pools
• Decrement of time required to find employees
• Candidates and HR managers often know each other through previous contacts
• Cost-effective way of recruitment

The 8 steps of Active Sourcing

Being well prepared and taking time to organize your Active Search activities is half the prize.

• Strategy: Define your sourcing strategy according to your candidate persona, goals and other recruitment measures.

• Planning: Agree on platforms to source at, tools to use and methods to try.

• Preparing: Define your timeline and KPIs. Prepare keywords for searching and your messages for contacting potential candidates.

• Searching: Get to know different platforms and how they work.

• Finding candidates: Filter, try different approaches – such as varying job titles or skill-sets – and compare the identified candidates to your candidate persona.
• Contacting: Contact potential candidates. Make sure you use personalized messages.
• Communicate: Be fast and pro-acitve when communicating with interested candidates. Answer questions, provide further information and talk about expectations and requirements.
• Success! Schedule interviews and/or watch your talent pool growing.

5 channels to try for Active Sourcing

Trying different channels and methods can be really beneficial to finding out what works best for your company and the vacancies.

• Talent Pools: They offer the advantage of not starting from scratch. You already were in contact with these people, e.g. former interns, working students or applicants.
• Social Media: Social Networks offer the option to search by region, interest or group memberships.
• Business Portals: Business Networks like LinkedIn or XING offer filters to search candidates thoroughly by specific criteria such as location, experience, employer or skills.
• Referral Sourcing: Candidates are contacted via current or previous employees, specific networks, business partners, investores, etc. The benefits of this network recommendation are the cultural pre-selection and technical recommendation for the company and candidates.
• Harvesting: Harvesting means looking for candidates with very specific skill sets on only one channel. This can be useful for more complex vacancies, e.g. in the technical field.

Sounds good? But what about the money and time needed for Active Sourcing? While this may be a valid point: Please keep in mind that Active Sourcing is, generally speaking, a much quicker method to fill a vacancy. This means there are less opportunity costs, less costs for your postings, less time spend on equalizing a vacancy through overtime of colleagues and therefore: less time and money spend in the long run.

Active Search might be working for many roles; however not every target group can be found on business plattforms. So another recruiting instrument might need to be considered: a performance recruiting campaign targeting on talents on Facebook, Instagram and twitter might be the way to success – a possible explanation why social media recruiting is seen as the biggest trend.**

You need help in finding the sourcing strategy with the relevant recruiting instruments for your position? You have started Active Sourcing but did not yet get results you hoped for? You are aware of the possibilities but not really sure how to start Active Search for your vacancies? 

Contact us and we will be happy to arrange a non-binding discussion to provide you with the best possible support for starting or optimizing your sourcing strategie and Active Sourcing for your company.