Due to the high demand for well-trained IT specialists, employers are no longer able to fill their vacancies from incoming applications. The labour market has shifted and the battle for IT talent has intensified. This makes it increasingly difficult for recruiters to fill vacancies. Employers need to rethink their recruitment strategy. They 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 recruitment 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 approach candidates directly from the network generated in this way as soon as a new vacancy arises. The term "active sourcing" covers 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 these contacts in 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., there is an ideal source for potential IT candidates.

Signs that your recruiting is passive

• You place job adverts on online job platforms and social media and wait for incoming applications.
• Your recruiting department spends its time checking incoming applications for suitability and administering them.
• Recruiters do not have the time to actively search for potentially interested candidates and are therefore unable to build up a network with them.
• You tweet a link to your job advert and post it as a status message in various social media networks, but then stop doing so because you realise that it's no good.
• Interested candidates are in your recruiting database, but you don't actively search through 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 of the applications you receive, that doesn't mean you're hiring the best on the market.

Advantages of Active Recruitment

Active Recruitment is a progressive and proactive method of recruitment and offers the following advantages:

• Active sourcing recruiters are constantly busy building and expanding the candidate network. This reduces the 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 the candidates at the beginning of the application process.
• Even if active sourcing initially burdens the budget, this method pays off in the long term. You will significantly reduce your recruiting costs.
• Active sourcing minimises potential interruptions in business due to unfilled positions and thus leads to greater customer satisfaction.
• Forward-looking 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. Every recruiter involved in active sourcing must therefore address precisely these points with the targeted candidates. Recruiting must understand what motivates the person in question, what is important to them and this is precisely where communication should begin. This information should be recorded in a recruiting tool so that hiring managers can address precisely these "trigger points" when the application process starts.

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 targets in recruiting. Recruiters should be measured against new targets, such as the number of candidates involved in the application process who are invited for an interview. Another KPI can be the ratio of first interviews to offers. It is easy to measure the success of Active Sourcing quantitatively in order to increase the quality of applicants and thus accelerate recruiting processes.