Ahead of Sourcing Success 19 on April 9th, experts from Recruitics, SmartDreamers, SmartRecruiters, and VONQ share strategies to win over today’s candidates.

Sourcing is defined as the early stage of the recruiting process in which recruiters – or specific ‘sourcers’ on larger teams – discover and reach out to candidates. Think of it like cooking, the better your ingredients, the better the meal at the end (controlling for skill, of course). Recruiting is much the same, you can save time and money while boosting the quality of hire if your team is sourcing the right candidates from the get-go.

Yet, sourcing the right candidates is a little more complicated than a trip to Whole Foods. As harrowing as the lunch rush can be,  –sourcers must define candidate personas, create campaigns, and nurture talent pools in a marketplace where attention is scarce and innovation is a must. Maybe one day your candidates are all on SnapChat, but that won’t be the case forever; sourcers are always on the lookout for the next channel or medium to capture their audience.

That’s where the experts come in! We talk to four Talent Acquisition leaders about their top hacks – all of which can be implemented today!

For more inside sourcing tips, be sure to register for our free online conference Sourcing Success 19, happening Tuesday, April 9, 2019 – 8 am PT | 5 pm CET

1. Make Sure Your Sourcing Fits Into the Overall Recruiting Strategy

Recruitics – Emily Tanner, VP Marketing

“One thing that will improve your overall sourcing initiatives is to ensure that sourcing is aligned with a larger recruitment marketing strategy and not just a standalone effort. Sourcing is just one piece (a critical piece) of a much larger picture that includes employers branding and candidate experience among other things. This is the best way to reach all types of talent (active, passive, and open job seekers) in order to attract and hire the best candidates.”

2. Run Remarketing Campaigns on Facebook and Instagram

SmartDreamers – Adrian Cernat, CEO & Founder

“Both Facebook and Instagram have an impressive set of options for advertisers, and savvy recruitment marketers are already integrating this functionality into their overall strategies. In particular, we recommend using “remarketing” campaigns, which let you show your ads only to users who have already interacted with your brand online. By doing so, you can make sure that you’re reaching the right audience with content targeted specifically to those users who already have some awareness of your employer brand. Since you know that these candidates have already reached the awareness stage in the candidate’s journey, you can confidently show them conversion-stage content and be certain that you’re not wasting your impressions. These users might be more overt in their interest in your business, and could be more receptive to a call-to-action encouraging them to apply to a specific job.”

3. Embed UTM Parameters in Your Landing Pages

SmartDreamers continued…

“Step one: pick the pages on your site that signify a conversion, typically the “thank you” page that follows a successfully submitted job application or otherwise entered your applicant funnel. Next, insert UTM [Urchin tracking module] parameters into the source code for those pages to enable tracking. With these codes in place, you can begin visualizing the journey that each candidate takes through your application process. This means that you can pinpoint each application to a specific campaign or CTA [call to action], while learning whether the applicant reached your site through email, social media, organic search, etc.

“Then, you can use this data to establish a baseline average for how well a typical piece of content should convert leads, and track the variations across different platforms. In doing so, you might, for example, find that your email subscribers are more likely than average to click on CTAs, but less likely to follow through to the actual application. Thus, you can take steps to optimize your email content to better direct users towards applying. “

4. Define What an Active Talent Community is for You

SmartRecruiters – Sarah Wilson, Head of People

“Without strategic campaigns, a talent community is just a dusty email list. Make sure you are nurturing candidates consistently with relevant information (a CRM really helps with this). Have your team define what an active talent pool would look like to them with deliverable KPIs attached, like decreased time to hire or increased number of qualified candidates.”

5. Create an Analytics Dashboard

VONQ – Marlies Smeenk, Head of Marketing

“Want to know how many people visit your career page, click on specific vacancies, or leave your page before filling out the application form? Do you also want to see where your candidates come from? The answer should be yes!

“Then make sure you track their complete candidate journey (from career page to vacancy text, from application form to the thank you page) you need to track the whole recruitment process – all the different steps. To see all these insights on your recruitment analytics dashboard, add tracking codes to your links. This way, you take the guesswork out of your recruitment marketing process and steer your own success. “

With a precise concept of the target demographic, recruiters can source with laser precision – here’s how!

It’s no secret that in the past five years, recruiting has espoused marketing tactics to attract passive and highly sought-after talent in this time of skill shortages, especially in technical fields. Email campaigns, creative advertising, and meetups showcasing the company culture and values are all popular means by which Talent Acquisition (TA) practitioners try to attract top applicants.  And they can be highly effective provided one thing, the team has designed these programs with their candidate persona in mind.

So what is a candidate persona exactly?

It’s very similar to the buyer persona used in marketing and sales, which Hubspot defines as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

Replace customer with candidate/employees and you’ve pretty much got it.

A candidate persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal [candidate] based on market research and real data about your existing [employees].”

Why bother creating a candidate persona?

Consider your candidate persona as the framework guiding your team’s creative efforts.

The truth is, defining your candidate persona prior to the launch of marketing and recruiting efforts will save you and your team a lot of time in the long run by ensuring those campaigns are well tailored to the people you want to attract.

The key here is research! But with so much information available in our digital world, it can be hard to know where to start. The following is a four-step guide to honing in on your target audience so you can start sourcing the best talent for your company.

1. Create a questionnaire

Below are some example questions, and largely they are similar to questions sales and marketing use to define their buyer persona, but there are some important differences. The questions your team use to define the candidate persona should not encourage bias, meaning protected classes such as age, marital status, religion, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, should not be factors. For example, you wouldn’t want to say ‘my candidate personae is a 40-year-old married man who goes to church every Sunday.’ Even some non-protected classes like ‘level of education’ should be left out if the role could be filled by someone with equivalent experience.

• What social network does your candidate use?
• What types of music and podcasts does my candidate listen to?
• Where is your candidate in their career (Jr, Management, Sr. Etc)?
• What’s the biggest project my candidate has ever taken on?
• What are your candidate’s professional goals?
• What benefits does your candidate care about?
• What does your candidate do for fun?
• What are your candidate’s strengths and weaknesses?

2. Find Successes

Current and past employees know firsthand what the company has to offer, and what is missing. The goal is to be as precise as possible to create a better marketing and recruitment strategy, so it’s best to offer anonymity to ensure honest answers.

Look for people within the company (or outside if it’s a new position) who are successful in the role already. Talk to them to understand what motivated them to join the company, what career level they were at when they were hired, and if they know of any professional groups on or offline that you could approach to learn more.

3. Use your CV database

When using your CV database to surface applicants make sure to test your assumptions. Let’s say you are searching keywords to surface candidates, add in the resumes of people who were hired into that role previously to see if they appear in your search, if not then that search may be irrelevant.

4. Get online

Analyze the online behavior of some top candidates, including the type of content they share and with whom, their activities, their groups, etc. can provide insight into their motivations and interests.

If you engage in an online forum as a researcher, be sure to be respectful of the space and opt for the ‘quiet observer’ role. If you start spamming the feed, you will be removed and recruiters in the future won’t be allowed in.

What now?

Once you have your questionnaire completed and you feel like you know your candidate persona inside and out, it’s time to start engaging. Use what you have learned (not assumed, this only works if you get real information) to message your candidates effectively both in content and channel.

This can mean finding the right job board (check out Jobboard Finder) or even creating a ‘coding playlist’ on Spotify. Maybe your candidate persona loves a certain type of podcast so you want to advertise there, or they can’t get enough artisanal treats so you set up a booth at your local farmers market. Get creative, the sky’s the limit!