Chances are, your recruitment team’s strategy to attract talent involves posting on job boards and visiting your company’s core schools, if you're at the entry-level. While these methods are sure to fill your pipeline with candidates, inefficiencies in those processes will likely cause you to miss out on talented candidates, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds. To find the talent your company needs, you should be proactively sourcing candidates, especially at the entry-level. Need more reasons to stray from job boards and career fairs? Here are five reasons to source proactively.
Build more diverse teams.
While job boards can bring in a large quantity of applicants, you can’t control what inbound applications you receive. If you’re working to increase the diversity of your team, this can make it difficult to fill your pipeline with the candidates you’re looking for. Sourcing allows you to directly affect the diversity of your team by actively seeking out underrepresented candidates. You can also help diversify your pipeline by bringing in candidates from different backgrounds who may not have considered your opportunity before you reached out.
Reach talented passive candidates.
There are a lot of intelligent, talented college students that don’t know exactly what job they want after college, or they’re only considering jobs in specific industries. If you’re looking for a business development representative that’s hard-working, personable, and writes clearly and quickly, the english major who was also the Philanthropy Chair of her sorority could be a great fit. But that candidate might never have considered a job in sales simply because she didn’t realize she was qualified, or she may have be looking at companies in other industries. Through sourcing, you can reach candidates with high potential that might have passed over your booth at the career fair.
Build your brand.
Instead of investing most of your recruitment marketing budget into campus events with difficult-to-measure ROI, invest in proactive sourcing that will fill your pipeline with the exact candidates you want while also building brand awareness. Unless you have universal name recognition like Facebook, Google, Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, many qualified candidates won’t have prior knowledge of your company or what you do. By reaching out with an opportunity, you can take candidates who have never heard of you and turn them into interested applicants.
Be more targeted in your search for the best candidates.
Instead of hoping the best and brightest apply for your position after reading your job posting or stopping by your table at a career fair, be proactive. While a job posting on a highly-trafficked site can bring in lots of applicants, there’s a good chance a portion of them won’t have the skills or experiences that you’re looking for. Through proactive sourcing, you can go after candidates with relevant backgrounds and spend less time screening. This is especially important if you have a niche position to fill. Would a computer science major with a minor in linguistics be perfect for your role? Don’t wait for that person to apply – seek them out.
Improve the efficiency of your recruiting process.
It’s time consuming and expensive to visit college campuses, but on top of that, focusing on a handful of schools excludes talented students from your pipeline. Sourcing entry-level applicants can help you reach more students at universities across the country while building your brand, allowing you to decrease your physical presence on campus and save money.
But isn’t effective sourcing extremely tedious?
Manual sourcing is labor-intensive – it’s why many companies forgo sourcing in favor of job postings or on-campus events. However, you can reap the benefits of proactive sourcing without hiring a team dedicated to finding and engaging the top candidates. RippleMatch is the first product to automate sourcing for campus recruiters. Our platform connects you directly with interested and qualified candidates who match your hiring preferences, helping to improve reach and the diversity of your pipeline. Around 60% of matches result in a 1st round interview, allowing you to spend more time talking with qualified candidates. If you’re interested in trying out RippleMatch, get in touch with our team today and we’ll show you how you can incorporate proactive sourcing into your campus recruiting process.