CBI Way: Improve Your Sourcing Efficiency

Guest blog spot by Outside-In® Team Member Alex Patton

Sourcing and identifying qualified candidates can sometimes be tedious, frustrating work. While this isn’t groundbreaking news to many in the talent acquisition world, it is also a pain point that can be resolved by taking a step back, and examining your sourcing process. By identifying the defects or weaknesses in your sourcing process or strategy, you can create a more polished, more efficient method to your sourcing madness.

Creating a sourcing strategy can contribute to smooth, effective, and efficient sourcing. However, if there is a defect in your process prior to executing the strategy, a well thought out plan can only do so much. For example, it’s important to completely understand the job requirements, specifications and responsibilities before moving forward. When you jump into sourcing without a total comprehension of the job, your time invested can easily become a wasted effort. And that wasted effort will likely negatively impact your overall success. Beyond the initial strategy, you may also want to look at your sourcing metrics to measure how different sources are performing.

Posting job opportunities can be a great way to have candidates quickly pipelined. And job boards can still be effective, with 25% of job seekers saying that found their job by responding to a job board posting (International Association of Employment Web Sites). However, in 2006, that same survey said more than 31% of job seekers had the same response. So, how can you improve your efficiency with posting jobs? Think about your sources for posting. Not all resumes or applications are a fit for you position, and when you have a lot of “rejects” it will negatively impact your efficiency. While it doesn’t seem like a huge problem, every resume you must review as a sourcer, takes away from time you can be digging for candidates you know are an ideal fit. Can you eliminate a source that doesn’t produce quality candidates?

Sourcing is critical to the recruiting process and strong sourcing practices help ensure you meet critical metrics with regularity. Ultimately, weaknesses in your sourcing process can hurt your efficiency as you continue to execute your strategy. Don’t be afraid to take a breath, step back, and identify any defects that you may be overlooking while digging deep in the depths of the world wide web. Afterall, information is the critical ingredient to improve efficiency.

Have you heard about our talent pipelining service, talentSOURCE? Learn about the sourcing service and benefits by downloading the talentSOURCE PDF.