How To Source Better Candidates Faster

The following article discussing sourcing strategies was originally published in February 2019. All copy and relevant statistics have been updated as of March 2022.

Currently, 31% of all hires are proactively sourced, meaning recruiters sourced and engaged them ahead of hiring demand. These sourced candidates are more than 2 times as efficient to hire than those found by organic recruiting techniques. Organic recruiting — simply posting a job opening and screening, engaging, and interviewing people that apply — is becoming less and less of the industry standard.

The efficiency of great candidate sourcing using the IQTalent Partners’ Diamond Recruiting process results in finding more precise and higher quality candidates than traditional funnel methods.

What does this mean for your bottom line?

It means your time-to-hire is drastically reduced, your acceptance rates skyrocket, and your team gains valuable time back when it comes to recruiting top-quality talent.

It’s essential to think candidates are more than just resumes. Ideally, these candidates are going to be your organization’s future. To calibrate these people into your recruiting and sourcing process, you need to engage with them and connect with them through means outside of the traditional phone call or interview.

1. Connect And Nurture Relationships With Your Candidates

Candidates don’t just deserve to be seen as people in the sourcing process; they need it. All due respect to AI and automation, but one thing you can’t automate is empathy.

Finishing touches like personalized messages can help nurture rapport with candidates. The human touch is vital in sourcing because candidates don’t want to talk to chat-bots or auto-responders — they want a real human connection.

AI and automation may make things faster and more simplified, but they will never fully replace the need for human contact and relationship-building. Personalize as much of the candidate sourcing process as possible to provide a humanized and frankly more pleasant experience. Some ways you can do this include:

Holding Open Houses — open houses offer you the chance to meet candidates and introduce them to your team. Sometimes the feeling of professional barriers can influence candidates, causing them to withdraw or hold back parts of themselves. Make them feel welcome so their inner passion and skill sets can shine. On the other hand, not everyone will fit into your company culture, no matter how talented they may be. Having potential hires walk in and know immediately that an open office concept isn’t right for them helps both parties move forward with their career choices. Open houses are a relaxed way to allow candidates and recruiters to gauge culture fit in the office environment.

Scheduling Workplace Mixers — these are a useful tool for getting candidates in a more comfortable, less professionally intimidating environment. It’s hard to find someone who would say no to a great meal, let alone one with the potential to jumpstart their career. Getting together in this less structured but still productive setting is a fun and quick way to research the candidates' interests.

No matter how you choose to engage with candidates, it’s essential to keep their personhood at the forefront of your strategy. After all, what makes these candidates competitive is likely what makes them who they are. More casual interactions help break the ice, identify mutual interests, and even test a candidate's ability to go with the flow.

2. Create Social Media Touchpoints

It’s not hyperbole to call social media the next great frontier. Between rapidly developing new technology and the ever-shifting hybridized workplace, social media can be the key to meeting potential hires where they already are.

Considering more than 79% of job seekers say they are likely to use social media in their job search, making sure you have a presence on these channels is crucial.

Recruiters love to talk about how many great candidates come from LinkedIn, but the truth is it’s not the only social media platform with opportunities to engage candidates. While 87% of recruiters are active on LinkedIn, only 30% are active job seekers. Passive candidates are everywhere, and an important step in building the candidate relationship is to avoid over-indexing your options from LinkedIn. To this end, here are some creative ways to incorporate other social media platforms into your sourcing strategies:

Twitter – 330 Million Monthly Users

Twitter is great for communicating with candidates, both formally and informally. At its core, Twitter was built as a social platform to provide news, facilitate exchanges between customers and companies, and spread the occasional funny meme. But there are many ways you can utilize Twitter to its fullest potential without having to physically tag (or @) potential new hires. If you're looking for evangelists or marketing candidates, this is a great place to mine. It’s also great for giving and collecting feedback and forging community relations, for now and in the future. 80% of Twitter’s users are millennials. That’s a pretty huge margin for millennial engagement, considering they will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025.

Bonus Tip: Create a Twitter list to organize your candidates and engagement. These lists enable you to manage the accounts and tweets you see in your feed. It’s basically like grouping the candidates you want to focus your attention on.

Facebook – 2.91 Billion Monthly Users

Although Facebook (or should we say Meta?) has received a lot of negative press lately, it remains the largest social media platform. With over 2 billion active users, it’s hard to deny that the platform has audience reach. Chances are your candidates are on here, and Facebook can be an excellent way to establish or strengthen a connection with them.

To source candidates on Facebook, type in a search query in the search bar at the top of your Facebook page. Here are a few example queries to simplify your Facebook search:

Facebook Groups are usually the best place to engage with communities and talent pools. These collectives of like-minded individuals span everything from marketing to finance, engineering to manufacturing, etc. Joining these types of “social public” spaces is a great way to network and mine for candidates by region, interest, or other topics.

More than just searching for candidates though, Facebook is a great way to connect and build a relationship with a potential new hire. Making waves to connect with candidates on Facebook shows you’re serious about getting to know them, which in turn will make them more likely to research and interact with your organization.

Instagram – 1 Billion Monthly Users

Instagram is all about visuals, so use it to show candidates your company culture! From events to activities, employee groups to benefits, Instagram is a window into what the culture is like at your company.

Here’s how to source and engage candidates on Instagram:

Use the right hashtags. Hashtags broadcast your job posts to relevant users across multiple platforms. When you use hashtags in your posts about company culture and open positions, you can instantly increase the reach of your post. One tip to remember is that you should always strive to make your hashtags as skill-specific as possible. Maximize your hashtags by choosing the most popular and relevant ones.

Post at least once a week. Waiting to post photos for photogenic moments like company parties or recruiting events creates many missed opportunities. Get into the habit of sharing a piece of your company culture weekly!

The trick to posting on Instagram is to make sure you don't “boil the ocean.” This means you need to be cautious about oversharing. Any posting cadence between 1-5 posts a week should suffice in telling the story of your company culture.

3. Encourage Referrals

The perfect candidate isn’t going to walk through your door ready to be hired. While we might wish more candidates could be active (and sourcing passive candidates might be more of a challenge), it’s a part of the recruiting and sourcing norm in today’s candidate-facing market. According to LinkedIn, referrals are the number one way people discover a new job.

Bonus Material: Discover new ways to attract and find talent when you download our resource — A Deep Dive Into Candidate Sourcing Tools

One way to find great candidates is to source from your internal networks — aka sourcing candidates from your current employees and personal circles. Current employees are often your best source of new talent, and employee referrals increase the likelihood that a new hire will mesh well within your company culture.

Your employees and coworkers all have their own networks and personal connections. These often untapped resources can contain a number of high-quality candidates who might be a good fit for your sourcing pipeline. Passive candidates are much more likely to consider an opportunity brought to them by a personal connection.

People want to feel valued, and they want to be heard. 

This rings true throughout social media profiles as well — people want to feel connected but also need to build trust before letting just anyone in. That’s where sourcing and engagement collide: you have to build relationships with candidates as you move them through your talent pipeline and sourcing strategy. At IQTalent Partners, we work with your team to build lasting relationships with candidates. We find the right talent for the right clients faster and with a better fit. Get started with IQTalent today