What Is Candidate Sourcing and Why It Needs to Be Part of Your Tech Talent Acquisition Strategy

By 2030, the global human talent shortage will reach 85 million people, while the tech industry will be at the highest risk. It is also projected that by 2030, the US will lose $160+ billion in revenue if the companies aren’t able to attract the right tech candidates. 

Attracting job seekers right now and retaining the best tech minds in your company’s database is the smartest decision. Being a part of a talent acquisition strategy, candidate sourcing is a way to help you build long-term relations with prospective candidates.

So, let’s discover the value it brings. 

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What is candidate sourcing?

29% of global recruiters say the lack of job seekers applying for the open roles is the reason they can’t hire the right staff. Given the talent shortage in the tech labor market, attracting and reaching out to potential candidates on your own becomes a more effective approach for staff recruitment. That’s why building talent pools for the future and talent sourcing are top priorities of the companies eager to hire the best-suited candidates at a lower cost. 

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Now, what is candidate sourcing and why should it be an important part of your talent acquisition strategy? Candidate sourcing is an outbound (active) process of searching for the right candidates on the behalf of the company. While the definition is pretty simple, it is sometimes mixed up with other HR-related concepts like talent acquisition, recruitment and hiring, so let’s clarify them in brief, too. 

• Talent acquisition is a general term that covers sourcing, recruitment and hiring. It is an ongoing strategy aimed at building relations and staying in touch with the best-fit talent on the market. 
• Candidate sourcing, in turn, is the process of active search for suitable candidates.
• When you’re asking yourself: “Then, what is the difference between sourcing and recruiting?” recruitment is a step-by-step process that includes sourcing, vetting, interviewing and hiring. 
• And, as you may have already guessed, hiring is the last step of a recruitment pipeline. 

The benefits of candidate sourcing

A proactive sourcing process drives much better results compared to waiting for the candidates to apply. Below are the main benefits of sourcing candidates on your own. 

• Reducing the hiring cost and time to hire in the long run. While the average cost per hire is $4600, talent sourcing allows for decreasing this figure when the candidate sourcing strategy is done right. Even easier, as each time the company needs a new employee, searching for them in the already gathered pool of qualifying candidates is less time-consuming than running a hiring campaign for each job position from scratch. 
• Building brand awareness and creating the interest of passive candidates. Most candidate sourcing strategies involve constant communication between the HR manager and the candidate, which organically grows the employer’s brand image via word of mouth. The latter is one of the top channels people use to look for new job opportunities, in addition to online job boards (60%), and social networks (56%). 
• Developing relations with the potential candidates. One of the candidate sourcing best practices is staying in close touch and candidate nurturing, gradually moving the right applicants to the bottom of the hiring pipeline. This way, the company establishes trustful and transparent relations from the very beginning and hires a candidate who is already loyal to some extent. 
• Attracting referrals via social sourcing. A referral program is another effective tactic to source qualified candidates at fewer expenses than running a hiring campaign. The essence of the idea is simple – if the company’s current employee suggests a candidate and a candidate gets hired, an employee receives a perk. 

How does talent sourcing work?

One of the best things about talent sourcing is that it perfectly fits different hiring goals. For example, you can source candidates for current or future vacancies, but for the latter case, candidate sourcing should be carefully aligned with the business growth strategy. 

Feel like needing person-to-person consultation on sourcing top talent? Talk to our HR experts now! 

You can also source qualified candidates with the goal of hiring them right now or building a database of suitable specialists, even if they don’t actively look for a new job right now. In the latter case, talent sourcing allows for leveraging the power of attracting passive candidates, who are likely to consider your opportunity, if you nurture them step by step. According to statistics, 70% of the global workforce are passive candidates, while 87% of both active and passive candidates are open to new job opportunities. Talent sourcing allows both groups to get to know about your company and eventually, some of them might join your team. 

In one of our recent articles, we have discussed how to source technical candidates step by step, paying attention to automated candidate sourcing and the ways to use candidate sourcing automation software on each of the hiring steps. Here, we’d like to explain the difference between automated and manual approaches to sourcing tech talent. 

How to source great talent faster?

According to Mercer’s report, 55% of surveyed executives find it difficult to hire the right talent at a reasonable price quickly enough. So, how to source candidates better and faster? Here are two tactics for you to consider. 

Leverage hiring automation solutions

36% of HR managers believe AI makes their everyday job better. In addition to saving time, money and sourcing efforts, AI-powered candidate sourcing solutions are perfectly tailored to the use cases and talent sourcing stages – getting started with distributing a job ad and ending with onboarding.

Tech Сandidate Sourcing Automation: How to Speed Up Hiring

Partner with a talent sourcing vendor like Bridge

Partnering with a talent sourcing vendor is another great option, especially for companies with no HR department in-house or lack of expertise on how to hire remote tech talent. Bridge can support you with this task, sourcing the best candidates for your project risk-free.

Here are other benefits you can get by partnering with us:

• Better speed. On average, it takes 42 days to hire an employee. And when it comes to hard-to-fill positions, the hiring process can take significantly longer. With Bridge, you can get the first candidates in a few days. 
• Lower cost. As mentioned, when hiring on your own, the average cost per hire is $4,600. In contrast, when you collaborate with a talent sourcing provider, you have to either pay for the actual work done by the sourced candidates, for example, when choosing IT recruitment, or a fixed fee for a vendor’s service. 
• AI-powered automation. More than 50% of recruiters say that AI-powered recruiting automation tools are most helpful with candidate sourcing. Bridge’s experts support this approach as well. Our data-driven engine allows us to find the best-fit candidates, while avoiding human mistakes and biases. 
• Local or global hiring. Bridge can help with hiring across three continents.  Depending on the talent you need, we would be happy to find it in Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, and the USA. Our sourcing team will help you either hire the developers in your time zone or find a candidate with a specific skill set around the globe.

How Bridge can help you get top-notch tech candidates

When you are struggling to gather the database of suitable candidates, you are welcome to consider sourcing-as-a-service. Regardless of whether you need to hire the developers for a currently open or only planned vacancy, we can source engineering talent using our data-driven engine, specifically developed for hiring top programmers, accurately selected according to your job requirements. 

What’s more, technical vetting is included into the process, so you can start with interviewing candidates right after getting a list of potentially suitable hires. In addition to being fast and effective, sourcing-as-a-service comes with a fixed fee that is 60% cheaper than hiring an in-house HR manager. 

Ready to get candidates five times faster? Send us a quick note to get started right now!