Breaking through turbulence: Sourcing strategies for the year ahead
Between an uncertain economy, a tight talent market, and the changing expectations of candidates, it’s difficult to predict what this year holds for the recruitment industry — but we know that actively sourcing talent will continue to be necessary for agencies
To differentiate themselves as brands that applicants would want to work with within the candidate-driven market, recruitment agencies needed to focus even more on candidate experience and recruitment marketing. Although top talent will always be in demand, uncertain economic conditions may make it tougher to discover great talent, forcing recruiters to change how they look for candidates.
Let’s look at ways to source candidates and what we expect to see in 2023.
Connected Recruiting
Your Bullhorn database is likely your best resource for sourcing candidates. Because recruiters are focusing even more time on attracting and nurturing long-term relationships with candidates, Bullhorn developed the Connected Recruiting strategy.
Connected Recruiting is a framework designed to deliver an incredible talent experience at every phase of the talent lifecycle. Since many candidates have grown up using technology, they require a digital consumer-like recruitment process. They don’t want to fill out long applications or have to parse through dozens of descriptions to find something where they are the right fit. Nor do they want to jump through hoops to pick up a weekend shift. The modern candidate expects quick access and frictionless experiences. At the same time, finding work is a highly personal experience, and in a tumultuous economy, people value human connection.
Taking these two truths as core principles to creating a connected talent experience, you can implement these sourcing best practices that will help you hit your goals – no matter how this year pans out.
- First and foremost, treat candidates like high-value customers. If candidates aren’t hired for an immediate opening, they still may be potential future hires or may refer future hires.
- Make the application easy. Applications can be a major source of frustration for applicants if they’re too complicated and ask redundant questions. This is often reflected in high drop-off rates.
- Manage expectations from the beginning. Share details on what the process will look like and ensure transparency throughout the process.
- Be personable and personalise all messaging. It may be an automated process, but it doesn’t mean a robot created it. Automation tools are just that – tools to be used to make the sourcing and hiring process more efficient. But there is a human behind the tool, so make that apparent.
- Know the company culture you’re hiring for. Do your homework and familiarise yourself with the culture and follow a similar protocol.
A smart method to keep your candidate data current and candidates engaged is to stay in touch with those who did not advance to the interview stage. Learning more about candidates’ abilities and preferences will keep them active in your talent pool and prevent them from being forgotten.
Advanced candidate search
In 2023, the constant pursuit of faster placements will continue for recruiters. Quickly landing top talent whose skills are the best match for open positions will always be a top priority. Advanced AI gives a more in-depth search that brings in top talent, meeting position qualifications and resulting in better fits.
By searching, intuitively filtering, and sorting data from within Bullhorn, the AI search technology of Daxtra Search Nexus is not only more precise but is faster and easier than ever before, giving you more targeted search results. It quickly finds the most relevant candidates using natural language semantic meta-search technology.
Features include:
- Term categorisation: targeted search where terms are automatically categorised by context into skill, job title, company, language, qualification, or industry
- Term suggestion: terms are ranked based on relevance and those most commonly used in the candidate profiles in your Bullhorn database, allowing for a query built to generate a term cloud of related terms to use in your search
- Term expansion: uses AI semantic expansion to analyse search terms and automatically build a list of synonyms including abbreviations
- Term proficiency: returns or excludes candidates based on when they worked at a company or held a job title, and sets the years of experience and proficiency for each skill.
- Saved collections: builds lists of your most used search terms to automatically run them as a new search whenever needed
- Candidate scoring: details on how a candidate’s score was calculated so you can further understand how search results are ranked. You can see why top-scored candidates are ranked first with greater transparency of the search process.
These features can filter your search to a shortlist of the best talent for each position and place candidates faster.
In the past few years, sourcing strategies have changed – and as time moves forward, sourcing candidates will become more of a challenge.
Creating a workforce for the future
In light of the uncertain economic landscape, finding exceptional candidates successfully will depend on search technologies that can help you uncover top talent. Keen attention to your sourcing process along with candidate experience is crucial, too. This is why Connected Recruiting is critical to keep you in touch and engaged with your talent pools.
Working together, Bullhorn and Daxtra give you opportunities to attract, engage, onboard and nurture relationships, building strong bonds within your ecosystem.
With reliable sourcing tools and a support system like this, you can be certain that you’ll locate the most qualified candidates. By working together, we can create a workforce ready for the future.
For more information on how Daxtra works with Bullhorn, visit the Bullhorn Marketplace.