Sourcing is really about nurturing long-term relationships with candidates. A person who is not the right fit for your organization today could be the ideal candidate in a few years’ time. The job of a sourcer is to foster a meaningful relationship with top talent, so that they choose your company when the time is right.
The benefits of sourcing are well-known: these candidates are more than twice as likely to be hired than fresh applicants. As a result, 68% of organizations say that their top recruitment priority is sourcing candidates directly. The question for most companies isn’t whether to source or not, but rather how to do it more effectively.
Sometimes practice doesn’t do the trick. Like directors lead the orchestra by waving their baton, top TA leaders lead using automation. You need to be able to design, manage and track the sourcing process with ease.
Not sure how to implement automated processes that reduce risk and boost engagement? Here are three ways to achieve it.
Music to Their Ears: Design Drip Campaigns That Will be Heard
Avature Workflows allow you to execute strategies that keep leads warm, stay up to date and target them at any stage of their process. The key to your recruitment marketing campaign being a hit is consistency and communicating the right message.
Avature automation capabilities mean that you can send emails that are personalized at scale, but you can’t get complacent. Sending thousands of emails is not the same as engaging with thousands of candidates. You need to craft a compelling narrative, otherwise candidates will forget about your emails as quickly as they get them or even label them as spam.
In other words, just pushing promotional content about how great it is to work for your company is not going to cut it. According to LinkedIn data, candidates trust employees three times more than companies themselves. Your employees are your best spokespersons, so make sure you use their testimonials in your campaigns. Also give candidates helpful advice related to their careers, interview tips, key industry trends, insights into what employers are looking for, etc. This type of information will strengthen your employer brand by letting candidates know that your company cares about people.
Keep Up the Tempo: Automate Initial Screenings
Just as a band can’t lose a beat shuffling through partitions, your team can’t afford to waste time going through piles of unprocessed and irrelevant resumes. Seventy-five to eighty-eight percent of those received per role are unqualified. Imagine if you could skip this process and just receive a pile of the best candidates at the start of the process. Automation makes this possible.
Automation is not a nice-to-have. Forty-one percent of HR managers concede that not automating processes has hindered productivity, thirty-five percent say it has resulted in higher costs and seventeen percent say it has created a poor candidate experience. Over half of talent acquisition leaders say the hardest and most time-consuming part of recruiting is screening candidates from a large pool of applicants.
With Avature automation you can set a specific criteria, such as years experience, qualifications, or location or willingness to relocate, to make sure that your recruiters only sift through resumes that meet your set requirements. This parameters can also be used to pull up a list from your existing talent pool or to import candidates from other platforms, such as LinkedIn or Indeed. You can also program the function so that searches are automatically run on a regular basis, so that your sourcing pipelines are kept up-to-date with the best candidates.
Autotune Your Instruments: Automate Administrative and Repetitive Tasks
Every resume that makes it into your database is potentially a blessing and a bureaucratic nightmare. The handling of personal data is a very sensitive area and organization needs processes in place to manage it accordingly. Avature can be configured to handle your compliance needs for you —whether that’s GDPR, other privacy regulations or any other legal requirement— regardless of what you want your process to look like.
And automation isn’t a one-hit wonder. Automation with Avature means you can be confident and creative in your output. Craft a series of branded emails that fit your tone and messaging. These are then stored on the platform, creating a library of templates that your teams can reuse in future campaigns. It also means that you can create new campaigns quickly and on the fly whenever an opportunity arises, to ensure that your audience remains engaged.
A centralized platform also means that your teams can stay in sync. For example, it can put an end to duplicate messages from different recruiters targeting the same candidate. This is an essential part of creating a personalized experience for candidates.
Workflows in Avature are designed to be flexible: they adapt to your processes rather than forcing you to find workarounds. Workflows can help you automate away entire parts of the recruiting process, like initial screenings. Pre-screening questionnaires can be automated and scored based on responses, and set to automatically sort out candidates based on their performance. In other words, they enable your recruiters to spend more time with qualified candidates.
In summary, automation in your Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) tool is transformational for the day-to-day experience of your teams; it’s like going from CDs to a digital music-streaming service, there’s no going back.
