Automated Candidate Sourcing: Best Practices For Skipping Recruitment Drought and Deluge

Recruiters today face a paradoxical challenge: they are either overwhelmed by a deluge of applications or struggling to find suitable candidates. It’s a bit like the Netflix effect: with a seemingly endless number of options, you can spend all night seeking a show you actually want to spend your time on.

Both scenarios present significant obstacles, impacting candidate experience, employer branding, and the overall efficiency of the hiring process. Through working with thousands of talent acquisition teams, we’ve seen that both candidate deluge and drought can stem from some of the same underlying issues: difficulties in adopting technology that supports the whole candidate journey, and lack of process to match.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve been seeing from the front lines of hiring, and how you can go about remedying drought and deluge in candidate sourcing. Care for a deeper dive? Skip right to our ebook on the topic. 

When Recruiters Are Overwhelmed by Job Candidate Volume

When faced with an excessive number of applications, several issues arise:

1. Candidate Experience: High volumes can lead to delays in response times, causing frustration among applicants. Top talent often receives little to no feedback, which can discourage them from applying to future positions. Candidates frequently experience "ghosting" after initial interviews, which damages the employer's reputation and deters potential applicants.
2. Employer Branding: The inability to manage large volumes effectively can tarnish a company's reputation, making it harder to attract top talent in the future. Every stage of the application process shapes how candidates perceive the company. Poor management of high applicant volumes can lead to negative reviews and diminished interest from high-quality candidates.
3. Quality of Applicants: A significant portion of applications may be from unqualified candidates, wasting time and resources on sifting through these to find suitable ones. Automated ranking systems might overlook highly qualified candidates due to formatting issues or algorithmic biases, resulting in missed opportunities for both parties.

When Recruiters Are Struggling with Job Candidate Scarcity

Conversely, sourcing from a limited talent pool introduces challenges like increased competition, longer time-to-hire, and potential compromises on the quality of hires. Limited talent pools require recruiters to be more strategic and proactive in their sourcing efforts.

1. Increased Competition: When sourcing from a small pool, the competition for top talent intensifies. This can lead to bidding wars and longer negotiation periods, significantly affecting the time-to-hire. Companies must differentiate themselves not only through competitive salaries but also through superior candidate experiences and strong employer branding.
2. Longer Time-to-Hire: With fewer candidates available, the hiring process often drags on as recruiters negotiate which skills are essential and which can be deprioritized. This prolonged process can lead to frustration among hiring managers and candidates alike.
3. Quality of Hire: If ideal candidates are not available, companies might have to settle for less-than-perfect hires. These new employees might require extensive training or a long ramp-up period, which can impact the overall productivity of the team.
4. Retention and Brand Perception: Employees with rare skills are often targets for ongoing recruitment efforts from other companies, leading to higher turnover rates. Over-reliance on the same talent streams can also damage the company's reputation, as candidates may feel over-targeted or perceive a lack of fresh talent.

The Challenges of Traditional Candidate Sourcing

There’s always something new in TA. But through hundreds of conversations with leaders in the field we’ve come to group many of the conditions leading to job candidate deluge and drought to what we “traditional candidate sourcing”. This includes methods such as job boards and career fairs, and the need to input data into long, repetitive forms. While these techniques still play a role, they lead to the following side effects that are detrimental to reliable candidate sourcing: 

Limited Reach and Visibility

1. Limited Access to Passive Candidates: Traditional methods often fail to reach passive candidates who are not actively looking for new opportunities but might be open to the right offer. This limits the potential talent pool significantly.
2. Perceived Outdated Platforms: Some job boards, like Monster, are seen as outdated, resulting in a weaker talent pool. Modern candidates may not use these platforms, limiting reach and reducing the quality of applicants.
3. Lack of Employer Branding: Relying solely on job postings can yield lackluster results if candidates are not familiar with your company. Without strong employer branding, it's challenging to attract high-quality candidates.
4. Limited Network: Relying solely on referrals from employees or your network limits your reach. While beneficial, it restricts you to a significantly smaller pool than the actual number of qualified candidates.

Time-Consuming Processes

1. Resume Screening: Traditional resume screening is time-intensive and inefficient, often leading to delays in the hiring process.
2. Outreach: Without automated outbound outreach, this process can consume a large portion of your day, reducing the time available for other critical tasks.
3. Initial Screens: Targeted outreach reduces time spent on initial screens by focusing on candidates who are a good fit. However, without automation, this process remains time-consuming.
4. Database Management: Keeping your ATS up to date is time-consuming and can lead to inefficiencies if not managed properly.
5. Coordinating Interviews: The back-and-forth with candidates and internal stakeholders takes up a lot of time. Some candidates even drop out of the process because it takes too long to schedule interviews.
6. Candidate Relationship Management: Keeping candidates engaged, especially if there's a delay in the interview process, takes time. Hiring teams are also often working with moving variables that lead to process jams, like internal stakeholder vacations, team availability, and at times changes to candidate profiles.

Lack of Data-Driven Insights

Without leveraging data, recruiting teams cannot optimize their processes effectively. Regularly checking dashboards and utilizing data-backed insights can lead to cumulative learnings, ultimately resulting in process improvements and better hiring outcomes.

1. Response Rates by Role Type: Understanding response rates helps determine how aggressively a company needs to source from day one. For example, senior software engineers might have a lower response rate, necessitating a higher sourcing volume to maintain a steady pipeline.
2. Response Rates by Company: This information is invaluable for targeting companies that yield the highest response rates. It can help refine outreach strategies and improve sourcing efficiency.
3. Open/Click Rates: Analyzing these metrics helps determine if candidates are engaging with the emails being sent. Adjusting messaging or targeting based on these insights can significantly improve response rates.
4. Peer Sets: Comparing your campaigns with similar companies provides benchmarks to identify areas of improvement and leverage successful strategies.
5. ATS Data: Analyzing profiles that make it deeper in the process can help target similar profiles, reducing time-to-hire.
6. Diversity Metrics: Targeting a diverse pool can elevate the entire hiring process, improving the quality of hires and promoting inclusivity.
7. Total Addressable Market: Breaking down the total number of candidates available by each desired skill provides the signals needed to relax criteria and keep the candidate pipeline flowing.

Source, Attract, Screen, Schedule

At Humanly, we’ve pioneered the first end-to-end AI-enabled platform to streamline hiring. Our platform can be leveraged for candidate sourcing, attraction, pre-screening, and scheduling. We formed around the premise that technology can empower hiring teams to eliminate the administrative work of running an equitable hiring process. This premise helps us deliver better outcomes for candidates and recruiters, meeting candidates where they were, delivering an outcome for every candidate and reducing friction in the hiring process. Over time, we’ve built out support for the entire hiring funnel using the same principles. In particular, we’re particularly bullish about what cutting-edge automation can do for sourcing through the following feature sets: 

AI-Generated Messaging

Humanly's platform automates and personalizes candidate outreach, increasing response rates and ensuring that messages stand out. This feature saves recruiters hours of manual work by creating automated, personalized messages that resonate with candidates.

AI Ranking for Inbound and Outbound

Humanly's AI sifts through candidate profiles, highlighting those that best match the job criteria. This reduces the time spent on manual searches and ensures that only the most qualified candidates are considered. For smaller pools, this AI-powered solution can uncover candidates with transferable skills, expanding the talent pool and providing new hiring opportunities.

Sourcing with the AI 

Humanly’s sourcing augments talent teams by providing a pipeline of passive candidates. We support sourcing through several means including: 

• The ability to leverage any website for talent discovery: Use the Chrome extension to turn job boards, social media platforms, and professional networks into talent pools. This ensures you can source candidates wherever they are online.
• A massive AI-updated talent database: Access over 600 million profiles instantly to find candidates that match your specific needs. Use advanced filters to narrow down to the most relevant profiles.

In working with a wide range of talent teams we’ve realized there’s no “silver bullet” that will work for every recruiting workflow or sourcing industry. The ability to start with a wide pool and narrow down your sourcing focus, or speed up sourcing from sites you know to begin with support a wide range of sourcing initiatives. Additionally,  Stream, our professional services team, enables customers sto spend minimal time reviewing candidates while receiving a steady flow of top talent.

Dive Deeper and Keep the Conversation Going

We break the hiring funnel down into four concrete steps. Explore how we’re seeing leading talent acquisition teams reliably find and convert candidates at scale through our deeper dives into the funnel below: 

• Source: Enhance your sourcing strategy with AI-driven tools.
• Attract: Create compelling employer branding to attract top talent.
• Screen: Automate screening processes to save time and improve efficiency.
• Schedule: Simplify interview scheduling and insights with conversational AI and guardrails.

Like what you’ve read? Download and share the (even more comprehensive!) ebook version of this article with your team. 

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