Comparative analysis of Candidate Sourcing and Recruiting

Candidate sourcing and recruiting by companies have enabled recruiters to hire talent who are the perfect fit for the role in question. If recruiters of a company are not satisfied with the applications they have received, they can reach out to a wider network that spans further than the immediate area of their office and go beyond the city or even state. Let’s help you understand how Candidate Sourcing and Recruiting are two separate functions of a hiring cycle, and yet the core responsibilities of the two overlap in this comparative analysis.

What is Candidate Sourcing?

Candidate sourcing is the process of actively looking for qualified talent to fill a company’s available positions. Sourcing expands a company’s reach and enables recruiters to access a huge pool of talent. This includes both active and passive candidates. The metrics of sourced candidates differ from that of applied candidates.

While sourcing candidates, recruiters need to find information that includes a candidate’s name, qualification, address along with their past experience, etc. In a way, sourced candidates are pre-screened.

Candidate sourcing is also one of the most effective ways to hire. According to a report by Lever, sourced candidates are more than two times as efficient as candidates who apply and on average, 1 in every 72 sourced candidates is hired compared to one in every 152 applicants.

6 Ways to Source Candidates Effectively

Some of the best ways for sourcing candidates effectively are as follows:

1. Use Applicant Tracking System: Use your team’s past efforts as leverage to recruit new employees. Your Applicant Tracking systems will already include details of candidates that your team qualified to work in your organization.
2. Diversify your sourcing channels: Candidates might be more receptive to less conventional sites. Employ a mix of platforms for sourcing. Approach candidates from specific sites that are dedicated to specific lines of work.
3. Include offline processes: Also source candidates through face-to-face meetings, conferences, events, and meetups or be on the lookout in any offline event. There is always less competition to stand out as an employer in this process.
4. Utilize your employees’ networks: Find out if your employees’ networks would be a good fit for your open roles. Run candidate sourcing sessions with your team to reach untapped talent.
5. Source candidates for unlisted jobs: Build a hiring strategy that gives you insight into your company’s future requirements. Get proactive with your efforts and hire employees that your company might need across the year. This will save another round of sourcing.
6. Draft effective outreach messages: Engage with the candidates you have reached out to by drafting a message with a specific subject line and including relevant information. Also, explain how you think their skills could contribute to your company’s goals.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Candidate Sourcing

4 Advantages of Candidate Sourcing

1. Improves quality of hire: Sourcing enables you to develop a better understanding of the role. Through sourcing, you have control over a candidate’s quality as they are picked by your preferences and requirements.
2. Reduces time and cost of hiring: Sourcing helps you create a pipeline of pre-qualified talent that you can reach out to whenever you have a job opening. Roles get filled quickly, thus saving you time and money.
3. Improves workforce diversity: Sourcing also helps you to uncover and engage with underrepresented talent and make them part of your organization.
4. Improves employer brand: With a diverse workforce and a reliable one, your company’s brand name is strengthened.

3 Disadvantages of Candidate Sourcing

1. Passive Candidates: Many candidates that you might reach out to might be actively employed and will need proper convincing for a positive response. Bonus read! How To Attract And Recruit Passive Candidates
2. Pro-Candidate: If you are reaching out to a candidate, the onus is on you to convince them. Passive candidates can negotiate from a position of power.
3. Large Talent Pool: Without a proper strategy and a dedicated team for sourcing in place, the volume of candidates you’re reaching out to might be overwhelming.

What is Candidate Recruiting?

Candidate recruiting is done after a company is done, sourcing candidates. It refers to the hiring of candidates through screening and interviews for the jobs that they were sourced for. The goal of candidate recruiting is not only to hire the best but also to build and maintain long-term relationships with the candidates by putting their needs and experiences in focus. Finding the right candidate is becoming difficult by the day. With the use of innovative technologies, recruiters and HR professionals are able to find suitable candidates.

5 Ways To Recruit Candidates Effectively

Some strategies for recruiting candidates:

1. Know your ideal candidate: Knowing the skills, preferences, and experiences you are looking for in your ideal candidate will make the process of recruitment easier.
2. Engage current employees: Take feedback from already hired employees to know what their motivations were for picking your company.
3. Use a recruitment marketing tool: Recruiting marketing tools to offer various solutions with which you can devise your own unique recruitment strategy and implement it.
4. Employ Inclusive methods: Keep an unbiased outlook while recruiting to ensure a diverse pool of workers. Provide alternatives in place of face-to-face interviews to not miss out on a good employee for logistical discrepancies.
5. Be flexible: Modern-day employees prefer a healthy work-life balance. Remember to communicate alternatives such as work from home, weekly offs, open environment office options if it is feasible for your company.

Difference between a Source and a Recruiter?

Sourcers and recruiters have different goals, employ different strategies, and require different skills. For some sources, the entrusted job upon them is complete once they have identified qualified candidates to the recruiter and the pipeline is adequately filled in. In other cases, sources have to continuously update the company’s pipeline so that any new opening in the company can be quickly filled in.

Recruiters post jobs, screen resumes, schedule and take interviews, make formal employment offers and hire employees. A recruiter should be able to sell benefits and set salaries for the candidates. They do this with the help of the pipeline that a source generates and employs different methods of recruitment until the required jobs are filled in.

Responsibilities of a Source versus Responsibilities of a Recruiter

A recent study reveals that 52% of people who apply for a job are underqualified and around 47% of companies report few or no qualified candidates for a job that they are trying to fill. The hiring process in itself requires massive amounts of time and effort. Every company aims at hiring top talent. The best talent is the only way a company can sustain itself in the long run. Companies nowadays direct their efforts actively to source and recruit the best in the job market for their teams. Let’s look at the key responsibilities of a Source and a Recruiter:

Key responsibilities of a source

1. Finding passive employees
2. Reaching out to potential candidates
3. Understanding the future employment goals of the company
4. Making sure the pipeline created is diverse
5. Ensuring the selection process is unbiased

Key responsibilities of a recruiter

1. Screening sources candidates
2. Liaising with the hiring manager
3. Arranging and taking interviews of sourced candidates
4. Communicating job details to candidates
5. Negotiating benefits such as salary, leaves, etc. with candidates
6. Improving the company brand by quality hire

Comparison Between Source & Recruiter

Sources work in collaboration with recruiters to optimize the recruitment process.

Recruiters, on the other hand, use different techniques and software along with feedback from hiring managers and candidates.

Despite being distinct roles, there is nevertheless an overlap. Most companies consider sourcing as an important part of a recruiter’s job. One person might fulfill both the requirements. This usually happens in small companies where there aren’t many employees to carry out the different stages of the entire hiring process due to budget issues.

Sourcing is a Subset of Recruiting

Social media and the Internet have truly revolutionized recruiting. Before, recruiters had to wait around for interested candidates to come across their job listing in the local newspaper or magazine. Their reach was fairly limited and recruiters often had to interview under-qualified applicants or worse- recruit them for jobs due to the unavailability of interested people.

According to the LinkedIn 2016 Talent Trends Report, only 36% of the workforce is actively looking for a new opportunity at any given time, but an entire 90% is willing to talk and learn more. This means that on average, only about a third of the talent pool is likely to apply for an open role.

Sourcing is relatively a new occupation. As companies expand their activities and become more advanced, new layers are added to the recruitment process. It is imperative to define both the role of a source and a recruiter separately. Both these jobs are cumbersome and despite the unavoidable overlaps, the hiring process is more effective when both the roles are carried out by specialized professionals.

While the two roles are symbiotic, they cannot be dismissed or interchanged. To ensure a more sustainable structure, firms should differentiate between these two jobs and give separate titles to employees.

FAQs Related To Candidate Sourcing

1. What is the best way to source candidates?

There is no single best method of sourcing candidates in the market. However, a combination of several methods can land the best candidates in your pool. These methods include:

• Social Media: Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter.
• Boolean Searching: Screen candidates with criteria like location.
• Job Boards: Github, Medium, Behance.
• Networking: Slack, Quora, Reddit.
• Employer Branding: Update company review websites like Glassdoor.

2. What is TurboHire Connect?

TurboHire Connect is a Google Chrome extension that allows recruiters to directly add candidates to their TurboHire account from online websites. This feature aids in connecting all your sourcing accounts with the TurboHire account. It has a sleek design and is easy to use. You can pick candidates from various job boards, online sites, social media, etc in just one click.

3. How does TurboHire’s Candidate Discovery help sourcing candidates?

If a company requires to recruit 500 candidates in a year, having received 300 candidates for a single job, they would have to screen 150,000 candidates in a year. Most of these candidate profiles are never opened as it is not humanely possible to review 150,000 candidate information. Industry Research suggests that more than 80% of these resumes of CVs probably were not even opened and 70% of Jobs in a company are repeat Jobs.

TurboHire’s Candidate Discovery process reuses old candidate profiles to fill new jobs. This process saves enormous amounts of capital incurred during job postings on social media, job boards. It also reduces time-to-hire as there is no need for job marketing and screening time for old candidate profiles.

4. How much time should companies spend on sourcing?

A recruiter’s sourcing time should be based on the kind of job that is required to fill. The time you need to dedicate to source for a hard-to-fill job would obviously be greater as compared to a job you already know enough about. For a job that is not above your knowledge, your sourcing time needs to include research time for gathering information about the skills required for the job and a well-defined job description.

According to studies, you need to dedicate at least 30 minutes a week to source passive candidates and build your candidate network.

5. How to get candidates using TurboHire?

TurboHire acts like a centralized location for all the great candidates from all the major sourcing channels. Job Boards, Social Media, Recruitment Consultants, Employee Referrals, Advanced campaigns, internal job transfers are some of the major sources. A significant feature that enhanced sourcing via TurboHire is the JustDropYourResume framework where candidates can directly drop their resumes. This feature improves your company’s candidate experience and engages them.