Engagement: winning resourcing technique of the future
FROM APRIL 2014's RECRUITER MAGAZINE
A US recruiting operations expert predicts that branding, advertising and the ability to engage with candidates will become “the true differentiator” in recruitment, and not direct sourcing, as technology and the amount of freely accessible information online about people level the recruiting playing field.
While direct sourcing of the ‘right candidates for the right jobs’ has been widely touted as a leading source of hiring in the LinkedIn era of pinpointing candidates online, that simply isn’t the case, Jason Roberts, vice president of operations, Randstad Sourceright, has told Recruiter.
“Technology is completely levelling the playing field for us,” Roberts said. “And as more and more people offer up their information for free on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, then everyone can have access to the same thing.”
And in the future, Roberts went on to say: “If everybody’s able to find the same candidates… then what we have to do is our very best in attracting candidates to us and selling those candidates on the position itself.
“The true differentiator is going to be capturing the attention, branding, advertising and specifically candidate engagement… The best at engaging their candidates is the winner of the future.”
Roberts has previously worked in both agency and corporate recruiting. He was the sole inventor of consulting company Accenture’s Candidate Pipeline Analytics System. He spoke to Recruiter in a telephone interview about current and future sourcing in recruitment trends.
“If you’re a pure researcher, you’re in trouble,” Roberts said. “If all you do is sit on the internet and find candidates, and you’re the best on the planet at writing a Boolean search string, your value is still there; it’s just not going to be a differentiator for long. Everyone will be able to do that.”
But, he added, “if you’re a sourcer who is good at picking up the phone, building relationships, building up your Rolodex over a period of time, finding the right job for the person and making that match, you’ll be even more valuable. That’s the engagement skill that’s necessary”.
Roberts referred to the US-based CareerXRoads’ Sources of Hire 2013: Perception is Reality research, which revealed that direct sourcing accounted for less than 7% of hires in 2012 amongst the 37 responding companies. In contrast, the companies’ career sites were credited as the source of nearly 24% of external hires. The responding companies had filled 185,450 openings and represented 1,591 recruiters. The report described “direct sourcing” in terms of candidates that had been “sourced, identified and directly contacted that eventually became hires”.
