When it comes to selling your company's products and services, you'll never limit yourself to just one channel. You'll likely use digital marketing, traditional advertising, email, organic social media, and more to maximize your reach and attract as many customers as possible. So why aren't you doing the same with your recruitment efforts? If you're only using one or two channels to source candidates, you're missing out on the opportunity to find highly qualified candidates by exploring other channels.
And as hiring becomes more difficult due to talent shortages, losing great candidates will put you behind your competitors. And you're not just fighting for top talent against your traditional competitors. You're competing with well-known brands that are also looking to hire quickly as the economy accelerates. Therefore, you need to find creative ways to broaden your reach and stand out.
Here are 6 candidate sourcing channels you can add to your strategy:
Employee references
If you don't already have an employee referral program, now is the time to start. Candidates referred by your existing teammates often end up becoming some of your most successful employees, that's because good people know good people.
Additionally, having a referral program in place costs you almost nothing. All you need to do is share your priority features with the company and incentivize employees to participate with cash bonuses or other rewards like concert tickets and gift cards.
Company website jobs page
Job seekers who are most interested in working for you will go directly to your website. And once they are there, they want to get a feel for what it's like to work for you and learn what you have to offer them.
It needs to have an attractive, solid website that not only lists your processes and available positions but also convinces them by highlighting benefits such as perks, culture, and flexibility.
Social Media
75% of adults in the US are active on at least one social network, making social media a really easy and free way to expand your reach to more people.
You can post your job openings organically or take advantage of tools like Facebook Jobs. Social media is also a good way to reach people passively: not every social media user is actively looking for a job, but if you appear in their feed, they might think twice.
El 70% de las búsquedas de empleo comienzan en Google. Si no está haciendo todo lo posible para aparecer en Google, se está perdiendo una gran cantidad de personas que buscan empleo y que están ansiosas por trabajar. Y afortunadamente, hay cosas realmente simples que puede hacer para optimizar las descripciones de sus puestos y mejorar su clasificación.
Ensure your descriptions are between 300 and 800 words and include the keywords your target audience is searching for, such as specific skills, certifications, and location. The job titles themselves should be short and simple to maximize clicks; aim for 1-3 words.
Job platforms
If you ask anyone actively looking for a job today where they've searched, they'll tell you they've visited at least one of these platforms: El Empleo, Computrabajo, Indeed, etc., so it's important to have a presence on these types of sites. You can post your open jobs on these sites for free.
Make sure to follow each platform's guidelines, regularly update your feature descriptions to keep them current, and use the most frequently searched keywords.
Paid job platforms
While it's possible to appear on job boards organically, these sites are incredibly saturated. The only way to guarantee you appear at the top of a candidate's search results is by sponsoring your listing. It may be worth spending money to ensure your jobs appear “above the fold.”.
Where to begin?
Of course, each of these channels is different. One that provides an excellent source of top candidates for one company may not be an excellent source for another. The key is to track the number of hires each source yields over time, and then adjust your investment in each accordingly. Optimization allows you to maximize the ROI on your recruitment investment. Furthermore, it's important to ensure that candidates you attract through all these sources are funneled into a single location that contains all candidate information. That way, no candidate gets left behind, and you can easily locate each applicant's resume and other details, identify top-qualified individuals, and move candidates through your hiring process quickly and efficiently.
You're probably thinking this is a lot of work. It certainly is. And if you're using disparate systems to manage your sourcing, track applicants, communicate with candidates, and manage tasks like skills testing, it quickly becomes even harder.
