What is Sourcing?
Sourcing is the proactive process of targeting and engaging passive candidates. It focuses on initial contact with qualified candidates who are not actively searching for employment but possess the necessary qualifications and experience. The goal is establishing a robust talent pool of suitable candidates to meet future staffing needs or address sudden talent shortages.
What is Recruitment?
Recruitment is a vital function within human resources that ensures companies find the right candidates for specific job roles, aligning with company culture and business needs. It confines multiple processes, including identifying, attracting, interviewing, selecting, hiring and onboarding qualified candidates.
Unlike sourcing, which focuses on proactively identifying and sourcing candidates, recruitment encompasses the entire hiring process – from defining job requirements to successful employment. This process can be done internally, through horizontal or vertical employer mobility, like promotions and transfers, or externally, by recruiting active candidates from outside the company.
Key Differences Between Sourcing and Recruitment
While both processes aim to find the best talent for an organisation, their methodologies differ significantly.
Let’s start with their focus, or their scope of work. While sourcing covers the front-end of the entire recruiting process, recruitment works on the whole picture, covering the broader, end-to-end process focused on hiring candidates. The prior is contained in the latter.
They are using different tools and have various responsibilities. Talent sourcing is the process of collecting qualified prospective candidates before their need is officially declared and publically announced. Nowadays, they often work online, using social media, especially LinkedIn. The recruiting part comes later when the job adverts become active and appear on different job boards.
The Recruitment Process
We must move one step backwards to understand the recruitment process fully. Recruitment doesn’t begin by simply posting a job – it starts by understanding the need behind it.
Hiring managers work alongside recruiters, defining precise role requirements, like necessary hard and soft skills, experience levels, expected competencies, etc. This role definition process produces a clear and concise job description and key responsibilities that precisely explain the position and guide the campaign towards attracting potential candidates.
The attraction phase uses job posting on different channels like job boards and social media to advertise the vacancy and reach potential candidates. The screening phase starts once the advertisement reaches a certain number of qualified applicants or its deadline. Reviewing resumes and cover letters makes a shortlist of candidates who meet job requirements. The last steps include conducting multiple rounds of online and in-person interviews, and the final selection of the best candidates who receive an offer.
How Sourcing and Recruitment Work Together
Let’s draw a nice visual parallel to the collaboration of these two processes. Imagine sourcing as the bow, by which the recruitment – the arrow – is guided towards the target. Sourcing strategies give you intel on where the target is so that you can adjust your recruitment efforts towards the potential candidates. The distance to the target audience and obstacles that can arise along the way are all calculated before the final act of recruitment. These adjustments lead to hiring campaigns with a better chance of success.
Sourcing and recruitment professionals are part of a combined talent acquisition team, working collaboratively to ensure companies attract, engage, and secure the best candidates. Together, they create a seamless strategy that results in a proactive talent acquisition process. By integrating their expertise, talent acquisition professionals help companies fill immediate roles and, more importantly, build long-term relationships with both passive and active candidates, fostering growth and stability along the way.
The Role of Technology in Sourcing and Recruitment
We must admit that both processes include a lot of repetitive work. That’s where technology comes in, revolutionising sourcing and recruitment by automating the workflow and enhancing the decision-making capabilities of the whole hiring team.
AI and Automation in Candidate Sourcing
There isn’t a sector anymore that doesn’t use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its work. The same rule applies to Human Resources. Here, AI tools analyse vast datasets across multiple platforms, such as LinkedIn, job boards, and professional networking sites, to identify candidates who match specific criteria.
The newest AI tools use Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and semantic search algorithms. They search for more than a keyword, and understand the context of the written CVs or additional materials. They summarise, extract, or even perform an online chat through chatbots integrated on the company’s website – this way AI frees up sourcing professionals to focus on strategic activities, rather than repetitive tasks.
AI tools can handle initial candidate outreach, answer queries, and schedule interviews, which is a massive help. They can even rank candidates based on their suitability for a role, considering factors like skills, experience, location, and even cultural fit, making the decision process much more manageable.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) in Recruitment
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have become indispensable tools for all recruitment teams. Their work covers centralisation of candidate information, real-time tracking of application statuses, and automating the whole hiring process communication. It drastically reduces the speed of sourcing and screening candidates, ensuring only the most suitable candidates continue the process.
ATScan seamlessly integrate with other recruitment tools and databases. They also have automated features for scheduling interviews and collecting feedback. On the other hand, ATS systems build a positive candidate experience by maintaining consistent communication. They provide automated updates informing applicants about their progress, reducing uncertainty and improving engagement.
How Data Analytics Improve Hiring Strategies
Data analytics provide us a glimpse into the future, by providing actionable insights into every stage of the hiring process. For instance, by analysing sourcing channels’ performance, we can discover which platform delivers the highest-quality applicants and allocate resources accordingly. They can also forecast hiring outcomes based on historical data, identifying patterns in past hires and determining which candidate attributes are most predictive of success in a given role. Moreover, data analytics helps reduce unconscious bias by focusing on objective metrics instead of subjective impressions.
Finding the Right Talent in a Competitive Market
While talent shortages affect many sectors, companies are exploring innovative approaches to attract and build a qualified talent pool that can provide them with the competitive edge. Here are some actionable strategies for finding candidates in a competitive market:
- Strengthen your employer brand
- Offer competitive salaries and benefits
- Prioritise flexibility in the workplace
- Promote career development and growth
- Streamline your recruitment process
- Engage passive candidates
- Champion Diversity and Inclusion initiatives
Importance of Integrating Both Processes Effectively
One of the key advantages of integrating sourcing and recruiting is the ability to build and maintain a strong talent pipeline by identifying qualified candidates before a role becomes vacant. This proactive approach ensures recruiters have a pool of pre-screened professionals ready for the next recruitment step.
Improvement of the overall quality of the hires is the next advantage. By providing the recruiters with detailed insights about the applicants’ skills, experience, and cultural alignment, sourcing enables only the most qualified job candidates to continue the recruitment process.
Sourcing and Recruitment with Olive Recruit
Sourcing and recruiting are two distinct yet interconnected processes that, when integrated effectively, can lead to ongoing success. Olive Recruitis your permanent staffing solution that can help guide you, from building robust talent pipelines with qualified candidates to aligning hiring efforts with strategic goals.
What truly distinguishes Olive Recruit is our ability to seamlessly integrate sourcing and recruitment into our partners’ cohesive strategy. Years of experience have taught us how to reduce time-to-hire without compromising quality.
By combining the strengths of both functions, companies can overcome their specific hiring challenges and needs effectively. Find out how Olive Recruit can ensure you achieve exceptional results at every step of your hiring journey.
