This post about sourcing candidates was published in July 2015. It was updated with new facts and information in August 2024.
In the past few years, your HR team has weathered the upheaval of the workplace and the HR function as we knew it — and that’s not an exaggeration. Depending on your industry, you’ve handled a wide range of talent acquisition challenges. Whether that was having almost too many applications to sift through, a serious shortage of skilled labor availability, or something in between, the uncertainty is nothing new.
One thing is certain, however, and that’s the need for modern candidate sourcing strategies. 65% of recruiters say that sourcing the candidates they need is harder to do today than it was pre-pandemic. So, recruiters are turning to technology, incorporating their people data, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) into their workflows for a fresh approach to finding the best employee for every role. Of the organizations using AI for HR, most — 64% — use it for talent acquisition.
With technology, recruiting teams can do more with less at a much faster rate. At the same time, it gives them the ability to leverage their valuable people data. With these resources, teams can find more potential candidates, improve the recruitment process, and make better hiring decisions.
You can do the same, taking an analytical approach to candidate sourcing when you leverage cutting-edge automation and AI technology to support your strategy. We’ll walk you through five steps for how to apply these tools and your people data to your candidate sourcing process.
Step 1: Define Your Ideal Candidate Criteria
This first step should take place much earlier in the hiring process than you might think. The best time to define the ideal candidate for an open role is before you post it on any job boards or write a job description. Ideally, you’ll do this before the role even becomes vacant. That, along with the rest of your sourcing strategy, is how you set yourself up to hire top talent as fast as possible when the time comes.
If you use recruiting technology like an applicant tracking system (ATS) equipped with the automation and AI tools we mentioned, you’ve got a wealth of data to help define your perfect candidate. You can look back at the success of past hires in the role to understand what made an excellent employee and what kinds of red flags to watch out for in your search.
For example, you might have required a degree for a particular role in the past. But as it turns out, one of your highest performers with the job title didn’t have the required degree. Instead, they honed a few key strengths that enabled their success. Thanks to people data like this, your team can more accurately define your ideal candidate for this role.
You decide to drop the degree requirement and prioritize candidates’ skills, immediately increasing your talent pool. Now, you’ll be able to attract job seekers who may never have looked twice at that open position.
Step 2: Analyze Your Talent Pool
An important component of effective candidate sourcing strategies is understanding your current talent pool. Recruiting analytics and AI can help you put together an accurate picture of the skills present in your existing talent pipeline and highlight any gaps you need to fill. Then, as you source candidates, you can prioritize those skills and tailor your efforts accordingly.
Technology is an indispensable partner for efficient talent acquisition. Analyzing records of passive candidates, employee referrals, former employees, and rejected applicants is a task no human can perform as quickly as AI. Your AI-enhanced ATS is able to sift through your candidate data at superhuman speed, identifying patterns and trends you can use to streamline your sourcing strategy. This structured analysis of your talent pool means you can target your sourcing efforts more accurately than ever to find the right talent to drive your organization forward.
Step 3: Leverage AI Candidate Sourcing Tools
With the power of AI, sourcing lots of candidates in a short time is now an achievable goal. The best ATS solutions include AI-driven candidate sourcing tools, revolutionizing the way you find and engage with potential hires. The technology can also point to your most reliable sourcing channels so you can prioritize and nurture those sources.
AI sourcing tools even include content creation assistance and automated communication. Use AI assistance to write your job descriptions, quickly spin up personalized candidate messages, schedule interviews, and even screen some candidates. While the HR chatbot on your career site helps candidates find job posts that match their skills and set up interviews in real time, recruiters can focus on nurturing the top talent in their pipeline.
Your AI recruiting assistant enables your team to provide a candidate experience that’s unmatched and complete sourcing tasks faster than ever. With the latest HR technology, you can rest assured that your sourcing strategy isn’t just helping you find the right candidates — it’s finding them in record time from the best sources.
Step 4: Implement AI for Enhanced Candidate Matching
After you’ve compiled a pool of top-notch candidates fast, thanks to your tech-powered sourcing strategy, it’s time to start getting in touch to gauge their interest. AI helped you find them, and now it can help you decide who to contact first. You can use your AI-enhanced ATS to surface candidates based on how closely they match your ideal candidate criteria.
In addition to relevant skills and experience, your criteria might include education, professional credentials, or geographical location. Using analytics and AI, your system can quickly identify those candidates with the most desirable profiles based only on the set criteria. That helps eliminate bias from the very beginning of the hiring process.
Along with AI-powered sourcing, candidate matching helps alleviate the burden of these time-consuming tasks. Your recruiting team can instead focus on the strategic parts of sourcing, like engaging with passive candidates, finding new talent sources, and optimizing the hiring process.
Step 5: Continuously Monitor and Adapt Your Strategy
As we mentioned at the beginning of this post, you’ve experienced quite a bit of change in the HR landscape recently — something we don’t expect to change anytime soon. Just like the unpredictable job market, the technology we use to find candidates is evolving rapidly, too. As these changes continue, it’s essential to avoid a stagnant sourcing strategy to stay ahead.
A dynamic sourcing strategy has many advantages:
- Improved outcomes, including faster hiring processes and better hiring choices
- Cost efficiency, helping your team avoid unnecessary spending and reallocate resources as needed
- Better quality of candidates as you refine your sourcing efforts to attract and retain people who are aligned with your organization
You’ll need to define what sourcing success looks like in order to understand when your strategy is working and when it needs adjustments. Use your ATS to track and monitor key success metrics, which might include:
What do your people really think about your hiring processes?
Find out with ClearCompany’s Talent Acquisition Surveys. Download the templates for 25+ questions to improve recruiting, hiring, and onboarding.
- Time-to-hire
- New hire and overall employee retention
- Candidate experience ratings
- Quality of hire (according to the hiring manager)
- Employee performance ratings
By leveraging analytics and AI, you get access to important data whenever you need it and nurture an agile talent acquisition team. With a bird’s-eye view of its effectiveness at all times, you’ll be able to make timely adjustments to your sourcing strategy and more accurately plan for the future.
Your AI-Powered Strategic Sourcing Partner
You need a modern ATS to power this modern approach to candidate sourcing, and we’ve got just the solution. ClearCompany’s Applicant Tracking System is equipped with powerful AI sourcing features that will transform the way you find top talent:
- AI-assisted content creation for job descriptions, offer letters, and candidate outreach messages
- Automated email and text message drip campaigns for simple, scalable, and personal candidate outreach
- An AI Sourcing Engine to jumpstart your candidate search, sourcing from your past applicants as well as a pool of more than 800 million professionals worldwide
- The Virtual Recruiter chatbot, your career site assistant that engages visitors 24/7, reducing applicant drop-off and converting job seekers to applicants — and even interviewees — in minutes instead of weeks
- AI Talent Match to help you prioritize candidates and eliminate hours spent manually screening resumes
- Automatic interview transcription so you can focus on giving interviews rather than taking notes
See the ClearCompany ATS in action and ask about our AI-enhanced candidate sourcing capabilities — sign up for a demo today.
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