Recruitment Evaluation: From Recruiter to Sourcing Talent Manager

A recruiter's ability to source the right candidates from different channels, with more advanced knowledge of creative sourcing techniques is in greater demand.

It's been changing for the past few years, yet it is still a challenge for many HR and Recruitment managers to change old recruiting behaviors and get their people on board. As HR and Recruitment managers look to take the recruitment capability of their businesses to a new level, many are finding that the slower a recruiter's ability to evolve and move with the needs of the business, the slower the organization will take to adopt innovative and up to date attraction, sourcing and talent management solutions.

It's time for recruiters to become masters of their business line or critical skill focus and start to build sourcing strategies that will guide their business managers and candidates to a successful meeting point.

1. Understand the Business Needs and Objectives of Your Hiring Community

The key question that recruiters need to be asked is: Where does the business that I'm recruiting for the need to be in a year, two years, 5 years? It's not only up to the recruiter but it is also up to the business to recognize that it's a partnership. Their recruiter and talent partner is unable to build proactive and focused strategies if they are not invited and included at the table when those discussions are happening.

2. Build a Sourcing and Recruitment Strategy Through Review and Consultation

If the business needs to hire 1000 people this year then the question is, when and where? When do they need to be hired by in order to affect the bottom line and create efficiencies in the business and where will we find them?

Have a strong and focused sourcing plan when it's based on growth can start the proactive cogs turning. As the old saying goes, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" and many recruiters fail to ask the questions need to drive more critical thinking. The other issues are businesses who are unable to workforce plan in order to allow their recruiters to become proactive talent managers.

3. Deliver Engaged Talent Pools and Communities

Getting better at the way that we engage with candidates is a must. It's now a candidate driven market and organizations who are not interested in two way communication will become less desirable to candidates who are receiving personal communications from businesses that want to listen as well as talk.

The talent pool has been around for as long as we can remember, but the more we speak to businesses the more we find that it's not something that is done very well a lot of the time. It starts well but then recruiters change or focus changes and the talent pool lapses and becomes inactive or forgotten. The other issue is that if you have a number of recruiters working on a single talent pool then they each have different ideas of what the criteria for entry should be.

Agreeing as a team what the focus is and why is the first step to successful talent pooling. If the team understand the commercial viability of the talent pool – the why we are building this and what the benefits will be, as well as what the criteria for entry to the talent pool should look like, then hopefully everyone feels that it's going to be a great source of quick reference. Putting candidates who came 2nd at interview or even those who were shortlisted generally are some of the basics.

Another focus that many recruiters miss when it comes to talent pools is that if you engage them in the right way, then your talent pool may become a talent community, recommending other great candidates to you because they love the information that you send, they keep up with the jobs and share that information with colleagues and friends. I heard a number of friends tell me that they are part of a talent pool for X organization and even though they aren't looking right now, they do like getting the updates about what's going on with that business. Be interesting and it's amazing how much that information will be talked about!

4. Know Your Sourcing Channels

We needed to reduce recruitment costs, so how were we going to increase direct, referrals and internals? What campaigns were we going to run? It made us think outside the box for new and fun ways to engage both our external and internal talent. It also provided the opportunity for us to do an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) project for our group so that we had some great message to go out to market with and attract candidates ourselves with a compelling and real message. By knowing where candidates are coming from, it gives the recruiter more of an ownership point. This allows the conversation to be more than just process is driven and can deliver a more fulfilling and interesting outcome when it comes to sourcing strategies.

None of this is new information, it's about driving change on an ongoing basis to create more engaged, influential, innovative and successful recruitment teams; and the great thing is that everyone benefits in the end!