How Sourcing is Separate (and Different) From Recruiting - Part 2

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

This is a two part series on phone and internet sourcing. Check out part 1 and part 3. 

Sourcing and recruiting are all too often seen as one and the same. The truth is that these activities are very different, and even if your organization blurs the liens between the two, it’s important to know how the roles are separate and how they fit together. In part one of this series I shared that sourcing is the act of locating, following leads on and uncovering candidates to fill a position or be included in your talent pipeline. This is done through a number of ways, from networking to phone sourcing to Internet sourcing. The sourcer does the initial pursuing of candidates and often screens them as well. But what some people may not know is that that’s as far as the sourcer goes. It’s easy to have some gray area in your organization when it comes to the tasks and roles of sourcers and recruiters, but if you’re looking to draw a line between the two, this is where it should be.

A recruiter’s role

Recruiters pick up the process when sourcers hand off the information of the candidates they’ve sourced. Their role is much different from that of the sourcer. If a sourcer is like the casting director for a movie as I mentioned in part one, then the recruiter is the executive director. They qualify the candidate further, work directly with the hiring manager and communicate with both parties. They orchestrate timelines, develop connections with candidates, make critical decisions and maintain a relationship with hiring managers. Together, all these tasks help them accomplish the goal of filling a role in a timely, effective manner.

The need for separate roles for sourcers and recruiters

Often times, a recruiter will source for candidates depending upon their needs and skills and the resources of the organization, and especially given how much a recruiter’s role has changed over the years.  However, these roles involve very different skill sets and responsibilities, creating the need for them to be two different jobs. A recruiter has a significant responsibility just in the project management area of their job. It’s a big deal just to manage the expectations and timelines of candidates and hiring managers, much less do your part to help both parties find the best match and advise them in the decision making process. One of the problems that recruiters run into is simply finding time to stay on top of all parties and perform follow-up activities that contribute to a positive candidate experience.

Sourcing also requires a different skill set. When considering what qualities make a great recruiter and what qualities make a great sourcer, there may be some overlap but for the most part, they’re very different. A sourcer is a great investigator, uses creative thinking and problem solving, takes advantage of networking opportunities and personal connections and does the digging required to find the type of candidates they’re looking for. On the other hand, recruiters must be great at developing relationships, overseeing timelines, helping candidates and hiring managers prepare for the hiring process and managing expectations. While sourcers can certainly posses these qualities and recruiters could potentially be great sourcers as well, these roles require that different skills be exercised.

In addition to the skills required for these jobs, the nature of sourcing and hiring also lends itself to being separated into two different categories. For instance, sourcing is typically ongoing for multiple positions, requiring a consistent time commitment. Additionally, legal reasons could also lead an organization to make these duties separate as sourcing often involves seeing protected class information that should not be part of the hiring process.

Watch for part three of this series to find out how to draw a clear line between the two in your company.

This is a two part series on phone and internet sourcing. Check out part 1 and part 3. 

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.  
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How Sourcing is Separate (and Different) From Recruiting - Part 1

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

This is a 3 part blog series on sourcing. Check out part 2 and part 3. 

The terms “sourcer” and “recruiter” are sometimes used interchangeably, but the roles of each can be very different, or one and the same, depending on the organization with which the professionals performing these roles work. While I believe that recruiting and sourcing are completely different and therefore should be done by separate individuals, I also understand that at many companies that just isn’t the case. However, there are many organizations today that see these as two different functions filled by two different professionals, as they should be. Sometimes resources necessitate the lines here be blurred, but it’s important to understand how and why they’re different and what that means for sourcers, recruiters, those in hybrid roles and hiring managers. When you understand how the two activities are separate but reliant on each other, it’s easer to understand the importance of each.

What is sourcing?

In our industry, sourcing is the act of locating, following leads on and uncovering candidates to fill a position or be included in your talent pipeline. Sourcers use a number of resources to find candidates, searching in the nooks and crannies to locate the best and brightest. This activity has historically been focused on passive candidates, but as I’ve said before, the “passive candidate” has evolved over the years with the adoption of social networks and online resources and doesn’t mean exactly what it has in the past. This is because sourcers have moved from using phone sourcing as their primary means of sourcing to focusing on Internet sourcing, or more likely, a combination of both, virtually eliminating the cold call.

Phone sourcing vs. internet

In the past, the typical passive candidate was someone working at another organization and not considering a new job. They didn’t have an online job seeker profile or a resume uploaded on job board websites. Sourcers would, and still do, find them through networking or phone sourcing in which they would call companies and do a bit of recon to find out who was in the role, names, titles and perhaps email addresses or phone numbers. They would then contact the passive candidate and begin the initial conversation to gauge interest.

This whole explanation is the very reason I say the term “passive candidate” isn’t relevant anymore. Today, the vast majority of professionals has an online profile and can easily be contacted, reducing the need for strictly telephone sourcing and virtually eliminating the cold call. Workers are also changing jobs much more frequently than they were 20 or so years ago, which means that the “passive candidate” isn’t as passive as you might think and more than likely is open to new opportunities.

Social networks, Internet job boards and resume posting changed the game for sourcers. Online candidate search is now what I call internet sourcing. Now, sourcers can locate candidates and find out a significant amount about them before they ever send a message or pick up the phone. The Internet has also given sourcers more creative ways to find candidates, such as industry forums, non-professional social networks and more.  

Beyond the resume review

What most people think of when they say the term “sourcer” whether internet or by phone is a person who reviews resumes and does an initial screening. While these are both important tasks that sourcers do in addition to seeking out candidates, they are a small part of the job. Sourcers don’t simply review resumes. They serve as an important role behind the scenes.

They make the initial decisions regarding whether or not a candidate might be a good fit, both skill wise and with the company’s culture. They often do this by qualifying the candidate by phone, via G chat or instant message before passing it on to a recruiter for further evaluation. Sourcers have a very important role and are really like the casting directors for a movie. They find the talent prospects but aren’t involved in the interviews, or selection.

While a sourcer’s job may not be complicated in and of itself, confusion often comes in when we start talking about how their role ties in with the recruiter and hiring manager, which is why the next part of this series will tackle how it all fits together.

This is a 3 part blog series on sourcing. Check out part 2 and part 3. 

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.  

Recruiters Are Really Project Managers

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The term project manager might traditionally be reserved for IT professionals, but no matter what your career path, you’re most likely also a project manager. For instance, as a marketer and strategist, I juggle multiple clients at one time. Each has different requirements, expectations and a relationship that is separate and unique. A project manager, regardless of their industry, oversees a project through the planning, tactical and measurement phases, from beginning to end. Recruiters understand this tightrope walk better than anyone else. Their title may be recruiter, but their day-to-day responsibilities center around project management.

It’s no wonder that recruiters aren’t just great at recruiting. Through an informal survey of my recruiter friends and colleagues, I found that the average recruiter is handling approximately 25 job listings a month! That means that they could be working with as many as 25 different hiring managers and around 5,000 candidates on a monthly basis. No one handles that kind of client load without some serious project management skills.

This demand on recruiters is what pushes so many to become recruiters by day and project managers by night. What I mean by this is that the workload continues on regardless of how hectic schedules become, the number of phone calls they receive in a day or how many resumes each job listing summons. Throughout a 12 month period, an average recruiter will likely oversee 300 job requisitions and handle 60,000 candidates. These numbers alone tell you that now more than ever, recruiters are master project managers as well.

From my own observations, recruiting project management consists of three key functions:

Meeting client needs

It’s clear that recruiters are there to meet the needs of those we traditionally call their clients: the hiring managers. But when we talk about meeting needs, what doesn’t come up as often is the whole other set of clients that recruiters have: candidates. It’s true that recruiters mainly focus on supporting the hiring managers, but great recruiters care about their candidates’ needs as well and have to manage concerns, expectations and hopes on both ends of the spectrum. This alone can take up an enormous amount of time, and yet many recruiters keep the balance well and develop relationships with both parties that are beneficial in the future.

Keeping an excellent calendar and staying on target

Part recruiter, part project manager, part calendar keeper. Thus is the life of a recruiter. Not only do recruiters have to manage their own calendar but they also must coordinate with candidates, hiring managers, potential candidates and many more parties. It sounds simple, but it can be challenging when you also add in the stress of sticking to a hiring timeline, staying on target and meeting goals. In order to achieve this, recruiters often have to encourage, remind and accommodate.

Playing match maker

Aside from the logistics of juggling dozens of hiring managers and hundreds of candidates, recruiters must also be skilled in making great matches. It sounds obvious, but it’s both vital and sometimes forgotten by the time you’ve completed all the administrative tasks it takes to get there. Drawing contrast from the IT world once again, it’s the same as a technology project manager also understanding the technological side of what everyone on his or her team is doing. In the recruiting world, it’s not enough to just be a great recruiter or just be an excellent project manager. You must be able to cover all the bases in order to move from project to project, researching and fulfilling the needs of all parties.

 Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

Internet Sourcing is the Best Solution to All Your Recruiting Needs

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Internet sourcing is arguably one of the most dynamic tools that recruiters have available to them today. By using recruiting technologies and algorithms that monitor changes and updates to the social profiles of candidates and connections, you can engage and develop relationships with the candidates that would best fit your company. Recruiters can utilize these tools, along with their own techniques, to find hidden gems who would be nearly impossible to find without internet sourcing. This kind of system allows recruiters to be targeted and focused in their approach and aggressive in finding the best of the best. It’s no doubt one of the fastest growing and most successful strategies that recruiting teams are using and is ideal for hiring for hard-to-fill positions and ones with an immediate need.

However, sourcing can be incredibly time consuming and requires a great deal of knowledge and skill in order to locate and engage specific candidates who suit your needs. There are a number of things to consider when evaluating your sourcing strategy, form how much time you’ll dedicate to it to where candidate info will live once it’s sourced. Here are four key questions to answer in order for internet sourcing to become the answer to your recruiting needs.

How will you manage sourcing?

Sourcing involves research and is often hard to scale unless you are able to plan for it. You’ll most likely want to leverage a recruiting technology that allows you to quickly search and engage a pre-qualified community. This keeps you from wading through profiles and pages of candidates who may or may not be qualified. This is just one way internet sourcing allows you to be more targeted in your approach.

What channels will you source from?

There are so many places online that you can source candidates, from the most popular social networks to obscure, industry-specific message boards. One of the first things you’ll need to establish is what makes sense for your company and what will lead you to the types of candidates you’re looking for.

What kind of follow up will you use?

Even after using a tool that allows you to pre-qualify candidates, you’re still tasked with the responsibility of actually doing the sourcing. This is where you have the opportunity to shine as a company. I recommend developing a loose message template to streamline the process and free you up to identify ways to personally connect with the candidate. Always, always, always personalize your message and give them a reason to reply.

What happens after the sourcing?

After you’ve connected with a candidate, you’ll want to have a plan in place that takes the guess work out of what comes next. I’m a proponent of building and fostering your own community that you can guide candidates to after an initial conversation, or in some cases, even in your first message. No matter what your strategy looks like, the key to great internet sourcing is using a tools and technology designed to help you manage, engage, establish and maintain relationships with candidates beyond your mining tools, ATS or social recruiting.

 Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

4 Steps To Create a Reciprocal Sourcing Strategy

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

I’ve discussed the benefits of reciprocal sourcing and how you can leverage searching and sourcing among the billions of social media profiles to find qualified candidates to fill your current job openings. With the growth of social profiles and recruiters’ needs to engage to develop the relationships while managing the data within the talent pool, social sourcing becomes challenging. There are too many candidates to choose from; this is why sourcing to build a pipeline of qualified candidates is so key. Reciprocal social sourcing is a solid solution to the hundreds or even thousands of unqualified candidates who are applying via traditional processes that is also extremely time consuming.

I experienced great success from creating my own referral network with colleagues outside of my organization and corporate recruiting team. My referral team and I would actively search, engage and share candidates that fit our referral network’s ideal candidate profiles crowdsourcing the recruiting process. We worked together to help grow our candidate pipelines so that positions could be quickly filled. My headcount numbers for evergreen positions in the sales and call center world along with their support staff fluctuated by month with the expectation that I could find candidates to fill vacant positions immediately.

If you are ready to create a strategy that will help you with your recruitment objectives, these four steps will help you.

Network
When developing your network of partners who you will team with, select professionals who you are in sister industries but not direct competitors. Consider partners who are already in your own tribe, who attend the similar conferences and industry events and with whom you already have a good rapport and trust with.

Prepare
As you invite your partners into your reciprocal sourcing network, be sure to define clear expectations and responsibilities right up front. Finding partners who already understand the reciprocity value proposition will be more advantageous for you as you prepare, however, understand that this concept may be new your colleagues and you may need to enlighten them as well as give them more time to better understand the overall benefits before they commit.

Set the expectation early of what the requirements as part of your reciprocal sourcing team will be for each member and how information will be communicated and shared jointly. Be prepared to have hard conversations with peers and friends if they don’t do their part to help your external recruiting team.

Collaborate
Create a formal sharing and communication process. An example could be as simple as a shared excel file in Google docs that includes some basic data sharing. You could also build this strategy into your TalentCircle preferences.

Track
Measure success through source of hire, turnover and cost of hire of your partnership versus other recruitment efforts. Including your reciprocal partnership as a referral for any of your leads and hires is a manageable way to measure the overall success of this effort. Even consider rewarding top partners quarterly with a gift card or even team dinner and drinks.

As I think about these four steps and how it can help you formulate your own program, I cannot help but be reminded how recruiters are challenged in doing more with less. Reciprocal sourcing can be a solution to collaborating outside of your company to drive recruiting results and lower overall costs. My community helped me hire 1-3 candidates on average each month. Sometimes those hires were the difference between me meeting deadlines and expectations in addition to the learning and friends I made along the way.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

Sourcing: What It Was, What It Is, What It Could Be (Part 2 of 3)

By Bryan Chaney

Last time, we stepped in the way-back machine to look at what sourcing used to be.

Surprisingly, people got very sentimental over their dusty binders full of candidate prospects.
As someone who keeps stacks of paper - and not very well organized - I can honestly thank my lucky wildcard asterisks for the internet.

Sourcing has changed in three evolutionary ways, according to my perspective. It’s the technology that supports the sourcing activity, the architecture of the teams that tackle the research, and the tactics that today’s sourcers have learned to leverage.

Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool

Tools

There’s a bevy of sourcing tools out there. Sourcing automation tools are intended for finding larger volumes of candidate prospects. They can take many forms and data sources, including:

- Resume database access from job boards, both general and niche

- Manual and automated search from major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo

- Custom career search engines like Indeed, SimplyHired and Beyond

- Sourcing aggregators like InfoGist, Broadlook Diver, TalentHook and SourcePoint

Sourcing augmentation tools are about finding those “purple unicorns” or the hard-to-source prospects. The majority of these individuals are passive and have limited information online.

Most of these take advantage of social conversation data, based on influencers, keywords and semantic search.

- Social sourcing platforms like Entelo, Diver, Gild, TalentBin, Rolepoint and OpenWeb

- Alternate search engines like blekko, blinkx, DuckDuckGo, sperse, socialmention

- Twitter Search, Facebook Graph Search, Google+ or FindPeopleOnPlus

- GitHub, StackOverflow, Reddit, the list goes on…

Teams

“Sourcing is typically part of the recruiting function performed by the HR professional, but it may also be conducted by managers within the company.”

  

Full Life-cycle Recruiters

Long-been the champions of the corporate world, the full-desk recruiter manages everything from the approval of the requisition to the job description, the sourcing, screening and assessment, all the way through interview and offer. Taking on every stage of the process means that the recruiter is the admin, brand ambassador, talent advisor, quality control and master negotiator, all in one. Which also means that he or she can realistically only handle so many reqs. The process of sourcing leads typically (but not always) takes a backseat to filtering through existing applicants.

Sourcing Plate-spinners

I’m talking about individuals that serve in a corporate or agency environment supporting a recruiter, or more likely, a team of recruiters. Having spent some time in the RPO world at the start of my career, I understand this model intimately. It wasn’t the most common method at the time, but has gained popularity. By separating responsibilities, you’re able to focus and refine your skills on one aspect of candidate generation: the research. You’re also able to work more closely with each recruiter and hiring manager (depending on the client relationship) to understand the job requirements.

Sourcing Teams

Separating what I call the upstream activities - research, first contact, pipelining and engagement - the sourcing function becomes the new face of the recruiting team. The de facto employment brand ambassadors in a system that understands the value of sourcing. Most teams are divided by internal business function or simply by geography, which allows deep understanding and a network of knowledge about a company’s hiring needs. After the prospect applies in the applicant tracking system, it’s up to the recruiting team, which now serves as more of an assessment and account manager function for the hiring managers.

The hiring managers also do their fair share of sourcing, because they have industry contacts and established networks to give the talent acquisition team a head start.

Tactics

“Sourcing can identify either candidates who are not actively looking for job opportunities (passive job seekers) or candidates who are actively searching for jobs (active job seekers).”

Sourcing passive job seekers can include direct calls to businesses that employ individuals who match the key requirements of the position. Some people call it rusing, others just call it telephone sourcing. It can also be accomplished through networking with various business-related groups.

Both passive and active job seekers can be located by sourcing job boards, social media sites, corporate alumni associations and through all types of networking. After all, a resume that’s three years old in a job board database, may lead you to someone who’s no longer looking and thus no longer source-able on a career or job site. There’s gold in them there databases.

Another powerful tactic that’s gaining momentum is community engagement, or leveraging inbound marketing strategies to start recruiting conversations. By taking a holistic view of a candidate profile or persona, you can curate shareable content that’s keyword-engineered to attract talent. Using a free service like Google Trends, you can see what others are reading online and searching for by related terms. (Side note: Who knew actuaries like to play Sudoku?)

Becoming a reliable source of information, you gain both of the key ingredients to unlocking employment commerce: 1) trust and 2) relevance.

Next up, Sourcing: What It Could Be

About Bryan Chaney: Bryan Chaney is a Talent Branding and Attraction Strategist. He most recently led employment branding and social media for corporate recruitment at Aon. Previously, he developed the recruitment marketing arm of a Texas based RPO provider that serves SMB and Fortune clients. He serves on the board of Social Media Breakfast in Austin and founded careerconnects.org, a community event platform, to gather niche recruiting and HR professionals with candidates to share career strategies. The Huffington Post recently named him one of the Top 100 Most Social HR Experts on Twitter. Connect with Bryan for consulting and speaking availability at Bryan Chaney.

Sourcing: What It Was, What It Is, What It Could Be (Part 1 of 3)

By Bryan Chaney

The line between sourcing and recruiting has become increasingly blurred. Where does one process stop and the other begin? I’ve worked for organizations that have separated the function into completely different teams. The line was the point of application. Everything before it belonged to the sourcers. Everything after, the recruiters owned. But more and more recruiters are being tasked with candidate research.

With the adoption of social recruiting and its brand exposure, the impact of sourcing on talent acquisition has been thrust into the spotlight. And to understand where we’re going, we need to understand our past.

First, we’ll hop in the way-back machine, to look at the “old school” version of sourcing and candidate research. Since I’ve only been in the recruiting field for 9 years, I didn‘t experience the “big binders full of candidates” era.

 Let’s take SHRM’s definition of talent sourcing as a starting point: “Sourcing is the proactive searching for qualified job candidates for current or planned open positions.”

I‘ve always associated sourcing with lead generation. It’s prospecting for companies and/or people that fit targeted qualifications. In the world of sales, it would be companies with specific products, or a particular number of employees. Many times but not always, with operations in targeted geographies. The sales person had to manage the process from start to finish. Very similar to sales, the recruiter would manage the entire process, or full life-cycle recruiting.

Within the last few years, market and business development roles have separated from the typical sales role. It’s the difference between inbound and outbound sales calls, and takes a very different approach as well as alternate personality characteristics of the people doing the work. Some call it the separation between hunting and farming tactics, because it takes more curiosity and initiative to stalk your “prey.” I’m sure we’re all comfortable with that analogy like we‘re comfy with a restraining order.

Source : http://tiptopmarketer.com/setting-up-a-profitable-sales-funnel-part-1-of-2/

Previously, lead generation or lead sourcing job titles were listed as “Inside Sales” or something similar, because these people were rarely, if ever seen face-to-face by the company’s prospects and clients. Cue the stereotype of sourcers as low-level recruiters.

As the spread of information and contact details increased and sales cycles got more complex, the need for a specialized business development approach was needed. Binders and Rolodex spinners gave way to Excel spreadsheets, which gave way to corporate databases. Ultimately, the data found its way into more user-friendly CRMs or Customer Relationship Management systems. The same is true of the divergence between recruiting and sourcing.

“It is not the reactive function of reviewing resumes and applications sent to the company in response to a job posting or pre-screening candidates.”

A recruiter’s job used to be the management of inbound candidates. Whether it was office or retail foot traffic, mailed resumes, or (gasp) faxed resumes and cover letters. The reason?  Research was easier. Job requirements were simpler. Personalities were very different for successful sourcing than they were for engagement and assessment.

Then we got fancy. Our targets got more refined and niche candidate generation started becoming the name of the game. Researchers scoured printed lists and telephone directories, looking for the right contacts to hand over, for the recruiters to contact.

“The goal of sourcing is to collect relevant data about qualified candidates, such as names, titles and job responsibilities.”

Hello, internet.

Over the last 20 years, we’ve been inundated with sources of online information. At first it was simple to search, but with burgeoning data, comes the need for more complex searching skills. More sophisticated search skills, means a more sophisticated sourcer.

Next up, part 2. Sourcing: What It Is

About Bryan Chaney: Bryan Chaney is a Talent Branding and Attraction Strategist. He most recently led employment branding and social media for corporate recruitment at Aon. Previously, he developed the recruitment marketing arm of a Texas based RPO provider that serves SMB and Fortune clients. He serves on the board of Social Media Breakfast in Austin and founded careerconnects.org, a community event platform, to gather niche recruiting and HR professionals with candidates to share career strategies. The Huffington Post recently named him one of the Top 100 Most Social HR Experts on Twitter. Connect with Bryan for consulting and speaking availability at Bryan Chaney.

Change Quickly - How Organizations Can Quickly Hire Candidates

By Jessica Miller-Merrell


We live in a fast-paced world. We expect things to happen quickly and often don't have much patience when they don't. We send email, texts, meeting requests and more from one of our many mobile devices and expect to hear back quickly. We are wired to be able to make decisions on a moment's notice and we've gotten quite good at it. But there's one aspect of a hiring manager's job that seems to not want to follow suit: the recruiting process.

From start to finish, recruiting and hiring can take anywhere from just a couple days to more than 100! It's a big job to find a good candidate and start the interview and hiring process and the unfortunate aspect of that is that life goes on. That empty position is probably slowing down business and slowing down your days as you continue to search for the right candidate. So what's the solution? Filling the position before it even opens up.

We know that turnover is inevitable, so it only make sense. If you're constantly recruiting, there's less lag time when you're ready to pull the trigger and hire. It's the secret to success for any HR professional. The key is to seek out passive candidates - they will be your next employees! In 2011, a study by LinkedIn revealed that two-thirds of HR professionals place an emphasis on hiring passive talent and 82 percent use at least one method of staying continually engaged with that group.

The great thing about this is that it's not that difficult. There are so many simple things you can do daily to start building that pipeline of candidates. Check out these four tips to start building your arsenal of potential employees.

Become a networking rockstar - at all the right places
Whether you're a rockstar at recruiting or not, you've got to be doing it in the right places to be successful. Think about the best places for your industry. For instance, a high-tech company in Silicone Valley frequents wine festivals and tastings where many potential candidates often visit. Go to luncheons of professional organizations that are relevant to your business and make contacts there. To recruit the best new talent, don't just go to career fairs at colleges; reach out to professors who know who the top students are. Network everywhere you go - the grocery store, lunch with friends, fundraising events - they're all opportunities to fill that next job opening.

Tweet, post and connect
Social media has become such a valuable tool in the least few years. Use it to your advantage by connecting with potential candidates that you feel meet the criteria of someone you would hire. Looking at profiles now might mean you won't have to sift through resumes later. It can be as simple as commenting on a post, retweeting or adding that person as a connection. This isn't necessarily the time to reach out with a generic message about your website's careers page. Use this opportunity to build a personal connection. It'll be more memorable and will open the door to build a relationship. Think outside the box, too. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren't the only social sites where you can build connections.

Don't let a previously-rejected candidate fall through the cracks
Ok, we all know that some applicants who didn't make the cut will probably never be a good fit. But what about the ones who left you wishing you had two open positions so you could hire them also? Don't forget about them! There are several reasons they may have gotten looked over the first time - maybe their salary requirements were too high, they didn't have enough experience at the time or there was just a slightly more qualified applicant. Keep a conversation going with these candidates and reach out when you have a job opening you think they'd be great for.

Keep a record of potential candidates
As you start to build a pipeline of candidates, you'll probably run into the same problem that most do: it's difficult to keep track of them. This is actually the key to successfully building a pipeline. After all, what good is all that networking if you can't remember anything about that person? Keep a good record of all your potential candidates using a spreadsheet or software made just for this purpose. Note as much as you can so that when it's time to reach out about a job opening, you know their qualifications, motivations and important factors in making a decision. The more you know, the better.

Whether you use just one or all four of these tips, keep the conversation going. Continually engaging candidates is vital to finding the best fit in your talent acquisition search.

What are your secrets for successfully building a talent pipeline?


Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit.

When Recruiting, Be Where the Candidate Is

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In an emerging social world candidates can be found almost anywhere on the Internet. According to the Candidate Experience Survey employers are consistently relying on the use of Career Sites to elevate their presence online in the recruitment space. Not only do 96.7% of employers communicate with prospects online before they apply directly through career sites/talent networks, but 86.7% of employers use notifications tied to these sites as a way to reach out.

Talent networks are becoming more and more beneficial to both job seekers and recruiters. Think of your career site as the center of your recruiting and job posting universe. Job seekers view your website as a resource for jobs and company information as a destination except when you don’t have a job opening available for the job they want. This is where a talent network really comes into play. Take advantage of the opportunity to capture candidates where they are and initiate a real candidate-company relationship.
For recruiters, being able to build a community full of talent and a combination of passive and active job seekers gives them more flexibility when trying to fill a job vacancy. You may already have some one in your community. When you combine a career site with a talent community, the job seeker becomes a person and not just a resume.

For job seekers, a talent network is a sort of entry point into your company, which allows them to interact on a more personal level with recruiters. Instead of submitting a resume into the metaphorical black hole, job seekers are allowed to interact with recruiters who are ultimately making the decision to move forward in the process. They view video and chat with recruiters in real time. No longer do they have to wonder where their application goes after submitting. Talent Networks as a place of interaction for both job seekers and recruiters is a win-win.

Employers can no longer rely on last-ditch efforts when sourcing top talent. Recruiters run hopelessly posting, praying and sourcing for candidate instead of taking a more strategic and proactive approach with a candidate and potentially their future employee. Each candidate enters the funnel at different stages and it’s up to recruiters to be able to start communicating with them on the candidate’s terms. The Candidate Experience Survey asked candidates at what stage they entered the relationship with a potential employer. The majority of those responding indicated that they had some level of relationship with the employer at a later stage, which shows they are ultimately the employers to lose.

On the same note, the remaining 47% have had no relationship with the company, which includes following, being a customer, family/friends who work for, or being an advocate for the company. This shows that recruiters are leaving an untapped network of potential top talent. This survey also suggested that those who have had no previous relationship with the company are 20% more likely to be hired than the 53% of those who have interacted.

Being available wherever the job seeker happens to be one of the most important aspects of recruiting and sourcing. Establish the initial relationship as soon as you can and you’ll have your dream candidate before you know it.

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Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs.