CBI Way: What’s Your Sourcing Strategy?

With a difficult requisition, sourcing usually requires a new strategy, unless its a position you or your team has worked previously. Sourcing is tactical. It takes critical thinking and an overall strategic focus to be efficient. But what goes into developing an effective sourcing strategy? Let’s discuss a few things to consider when tackling your next hard-to-fill requisition.

By this point in the process, you should have an excellent grasp on the position details, summary, requirements, and the ideal candidate. Additionally, knowing the focus of the client’s strategy is key, be it a long-term or short-term recruitment strategy. As discussed often, constant and open communication with the client is also essential.

Now it’s time to start asking yourself some questions about the ideal candidate you are searching for while executing your strategy. Where would this person be engaging with other industry professionals? Whether it be social media, networking events, associations, publications, etc. Where would you most likely find your candidate “hanging out”? Identifying these outlets is going to go a long way in determining what appeals to and gets the attention of passive candidates.

This part of developing the strategy can lead to approaches you may not have originally established. It is going to be much easier to productively promote and market the opening when all of the outlets most frequented by target candidates are identified and investigated. However, mapping out locations of ideal candidates is just one of the steps to developing an effective sourcing strategy. Check out the next CBI Way Blog where we’ll continue to discuss putting together your approach to sourcing for a hard-to-fill job.