Sourcing From Multiple Sources

While I was at ERE Fall 2011, I spoke to many recruiters from multiple different companies and industries. Being an event focused on recruiting and sourcing, 'how to” and “where to” source the best talent were both hot topics.

A common theme I noticed throughout most of my conversations were recruiters felt there wasn’t a lack of candidates out there, in fact there were too many (as evidenced by current unemployment figures). The challenge is having to search multiple different sources, using complex Boolean search strings to sift through the mountains of unqualified candidates to find a potential winner. Searching for that needle in a haystack can be frustrating and certainly time-consuming. Even when you find a group of qualified candidates from different sources, having to evaluate and manually rank candidates by their resume information takes even more time.

Okay, I’ll admit, that’s not shocking. These are challenges recruiters have faced for a very long time. It’s what they do. So why am I writing this post? Simply to let people know that technology exists today to ease these challenges and make recruiters more efficient and effective at finding the best talent.

I spoke to a recruiter named Sarah who described to me her typical process for sourcing candidates for a particular role. It went as follows:

1. Attempt to search her ATS for candidates already on file (I say attempt because the keyword search function in Sarah's ATS was extremely limited)
2. Create Boolean search strings and search the Careerbuilder candidate database
3. Create Boolean search strings and search the Dice candidate database
4. Search LinkedIn for active and passive candidates
5. Create Boolean search strings and search the open web through Google
6. Gather any qualified candidates found through steps 1-5 and review each candidate’s information (presented in varying formats) to manually create a shortlist
7. Reach out to the shortlisted candidates

I’m sure there are many recruiters out there who follow a very similar process. But what if you could take this 7-step process and cut it down to 2-steps?

1. Input the criteria of your ideal candidate and search all your sources using Talemetry (candidates are ranked in order of best-fit)
2. Reach out to the shortlisted candidates

Think of the time savings. Time that could then be spent connecting and interacting with the best candidates found, rather than building complex search strings for multiple sources.