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. “
