Active sourcing for sustainable recruiting success

Due to the high demand for well-trained IT specialists, employers are no longer able to fill their vacant positions from incoming applications. The job market has shifted, and the battle for IT talent has intensified. This makes it increasingly difficult for recruiters to fill open positions. Employers need to rethink their recruiting strategy. You can no longer sit back and wait for applications to come in. They need to be proactive and actively reach out to talent.

What is Active Sourcing?

Active sourcing is the identification, approach and acquisition of top talent. It involves long-term networking even before a position is vacant. The candidate pipeline built up in this way helps employers to directly address candidates from the network generated in this way as soon as a new position is to be filled. The term "active sourcing" includes all steps in recruiting, from the initial direct approach to convincing candidates to join the company.

How does Active Sourcing work?

Regardless of whether candidates are currently looking for a job or not, whether they are still studying or have just started at a company: Employers need to make contacts and maintain those contacts over the long term. Companies need to build relationships with IT talent and maintain them through regular contact. Events at colleges and universities are suitable for this, as are career fairs and networking events. Active recruiting thus forms the basis for faster recruiting processes in order to fill vacancies more quickly.

Social networking is thus becoming the tool of choice for modern recruiters. With millions of users on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, XING, etc., it offers an optimal source for potential IT candidates.

Signs that your recruiting is passive

• They post job ads on online job platforms and social media and wait for applications to come in.
• Their recruiting spends their time screening and administering incoming applications for eligibility.
• Recruiters do not have time to actively search for candidates who may be interested, and thus are not able to network with them.
• You tweet a link to your job ad and post it as a status message on various social media networks, but stop again because you realize it's no use.
• Interested candidates exist in your recruiting database, but you don't actively search them, you just keep adding new ones without working with them.

A passive recruiting strategy will never help you fill your open IT positions. Even if you hire the best from the applications you receive, it does not mean that you are hiring the best in the market.

Advantages of Active Recruitment

Active Recruitment is a progressive and proactive method of recruiting and offers the following benefits:

• Active sourcing recruiters are continuously engaged in building and expanding the candidate network. This reduces time-to-hire by 50%.
• Active recruiting increases the success rate in interviews by a factor of 7, as recruiters have already established a relationship of trust with candidates at the beginning of the application process.
• Even if Active Sourcing initially burdens the budget, this method pays off in the long run. You will significantly reduce your recruiting costs.
• Active sourcing minimizes potential disruptions to business due to unfilled positions, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
• Anticipatory development of a candidate pipeline with potential interested parties leads to faster filling of your vacancies

3 tips on how to implement active sourcing

1. redefine the role of the recruiter

The best candidates don't just want a job. They want to work for a company that offers a great environment: a positive company culture that aligns with their personal goals. Any recruiter engaged in active sourcing must therefore address these very issues with targeted candidates. Recruiting must understand what motivates the person in question, what is important to him or her, and start communicating precisely here. To support this, this information should be recorded in a recruiting tool so that later, when the application process starts, the hiring managers can address precisely these "trigger points".

2. review the recruiting processes

Time-consuming process steps in recruiting should be automated so that recruiters can spend their time networking. This may require the introduction of a new recruiting tool that is capable of mapping the processes.

3. redefinition of KPIs in recruiting

Active sourcing requires a redefinition of goals in recruiting. Recruiters should be measured against new targets, such as the number of candidates brought into the application process who are invited to interview. Another KPI can be the ratio of initial interviews to offers. It is easy to quantitatively measure the success of active sourcing in order to increase the quality of applicants and thus accelerate recruiting processes.