Your company just like others wants to recruit the best talent available. You must be looking for the cream of the crop, the best of the best. However, finding this level of talent can be a challenge. It could be that for every qualified candidate you find, there are dozens more who are not as qualified or simply do not have what it takes to be an asset to your company. If this is the case, this article is for you;
What Does Great Talent Mean to Business?
If you can’t find great people to work for your startup, you have no excuse. The success of your business wholly depends on the kind of people you bring on board. There are more smart people looking for jobs than there are startups.
So why are so many startups so bad at finding great people? The usual excuse is that they can’t afford to be picky. But the real problem is that most startups don’t even try. They know it’s important to get good people, but they don’t really believe it.
The way you change that is by learning from experience. When a company succeeds, the founders often credit their own brilliance in hiring great people. But when it fails–as most do–you rarely hear this explanation.
All too often, failure is blamed on bad luck, competitors who were also pursuing a promising idea, and so on. Rarely does anyone blame the failure on having hired the wrong people even though in most cases that was probably the cause of failure? So, if you are asking for tips on how to source talent, here’s what you need to know.
How to Find the Best Talent
Talent sourcing is one way you can ensure that you are getting the best possible candidates for your job openings. This is a pretty straightforward concept. Rather than waiting for people to apply for your jobs or posting ads and hoping someone comes along who is right for the position, you actively search for suitable candidates.
The key to talent sourcing is getting information about potential hires before they ever apply for a job with your company. In this way, you can handpick candidates who meet your qualifications and get them interested in working with your company before they even know there is a job opening. These potential employees will then become part of an “active pool” that you can draw from whenever you have an opening.
Is Talent Sourcing Effective?
Today’s best recruiters are using talent sourcing, an innovative method of searching for potential candidates, to find and attract the best people for their organizations. Talent sourcers use social media, job boards, and other resources to locate and engage with passive candidates. These are people who are not actively looking for jobs but would be interested if the right opportunity came along.
For example, through talent sourcing, a recruiter might use LinkedIn to find potential candidates by using keywords related to a particular type of person or a particular skill set. The recruiter might then send personal messages to those people inviting them to explore a new job opportunity. Because talent sourcing is so new, many recruiters haven’t yet learned how to do it effectively.
Why Should You Care About Talent Sourcing?
Talent sourcing is a method for finding, assessing, and engaging with potential future employees. The main benefits of talent sourcing are:
- To find individuals who aren’t actively looking for a new job but may be interested in the opportunities your company has to offer.
- To keep hold of a pool of candidates you can access when you do have an open role to fill.
- The capability to reach out to candidates before they start looking and get in touch with them at the right time.
- Gives your company a competitive advantage by creating a talent pipeline ahead of time.
What You Need to Know About Recruiting Process
Recruiting is a two-step process. First, you have to find people who are qualified for the job you’re trying to fill. Then you have to find people who are qualified and interested in the job you’re trying to fill.
In practice, this means that recruiting is hard. It’s not enough just to post on a job board. If it were, the big companies wouldn’t be paying recruiters big commissions. They could just post their jobs on job search websites and wait for the resumes to roll in.
The second of these steps is hard because there are not that many people out there looking for jobs, especially at startups. A startup might hire one person a year out of all the resumes they get, even with no other restrictions than “good at what we need.” So, if they need someone who can program and also has sales experience, they may hire no one all year.
Hiring isn’t just a matter of finding someone good. It’s also a matter of finding someone who wants your job. This means to hire more people, you have to convince more people that working at your company is better than not working at your company. And usually, the only way to do that is by making your company more attractive.
Recruitment Models
One way to think of how to do hiring is in terms of two competing models: the Player and the Coach.
The Player model is to find brilliant people and see what they can do. If you’re lucky, they’ll build something wonderful, and you’ll get a reputation as a great place to work.
The Coach model is to lay out a plan for what needs to get built, then find people who are good at executing on that sort of plan, and just tell them what to do.
These models make sense in different contexts-the player model makes more sense if you’re trying to do something new because it’s hard to predict what will happen. The Coach model makes more sense if you know more or less what needs to happen, and success depends primarily on execution.
Key Takeaway
Talent sourcing is part of talent acquisition and is usually conducted by talent sourcers-these are professionals who seek out and find potential candidates for future job vacancies. Talent sourcers use a variety of search techniques to find potential candidates, including Boolean search strings, social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter, referrals, and other methods. They then assess potential candidates to determine suitability for the role being filled. Talent sourcers may also communicate with passive job seekers to persuade them to apply for current or future job openings.
