The 5 Master Steps of Talent Sourcing by Nicole

Always be suspicious if a Brazilian says to you “let’s schedule something!”. The truth is that you won’t see each other soon, trust me.

It seems I am one of them because my “See you next month” from the past blog looks like from one thousand years ago.

But hey, better late than later.

I would like to start by saying that this is a special blog because I am finalizing this series. It’s 2023 and being the Sourcer of the year 2021 is old news nowadays.

On the other hand, sourcing is always brand new since the market is constantly and rapidly changing all the time. Therefore, I would like to dedicate this final blog to writing about the Sourcing process.

Talent Sourcing can be quite abstract, and therefore I will start mapping the process to show you the importance of Talent Sourcing for recruitment and how we have a methodology behind our work.

As we are specialists in “hunting people”, we work with concrete strategies, and we follow these step by step to ensure the best results:

Step 1 – Market Research

Everything starts here. It does not matter if it’s the first time we hear about a client or a position: without good and structured market research our work is ineffective.

If the client is new to us, we will concentrate on learning about our client’s industry, competitors, products, and unique selling points.

We will dive into their LinkedIn page, website, and all the relevant information we can get our hands on.

This knowledge will help us during our intake meetings with clients every time we receive a new role to search for candidates.

But all this information can be confusing, so how can we select the right ones? How can we find information that will aggregate and not deviate from our work? How do we recognize the information that will help our client and our search?

Simply: how can we find relevant information?

Every Sourcer has a special eye and will catch different pieces of information.

What we do with it and how we work with this data it is what makes our knowledge strong. Trying to be very transparent, it varies Sourcer by Sourcer and client by client.

Step 2 – *Understanding the profile***

Once we understood the market, we will go for the next step: understanding the magical unicorn we will hunt.

Those questions plus more deep questions will be stored in a file that we will come back to every time we need to refresh our minds.

Step 3– *Build the pipeline***

Ok, now that we know the profile we are looking for and the type of market we will be hunting in: it’s time for action!

Linkedin is now our best friend, but in case we think it’s necessary, we can expand our close friends to other platforms. Something we do often.

(Don’t tell anyone: but Linkedin will always be my favorite one).

In the Pipeline phase, we will try to find and save many profiles to connect with and to make familiar with the company opportunity.

This is a process of quality, but also of quantity. Firstly, we will look for the most suitable candidates according to the meeting we had about the vacancy.

However, the Dutch market is very tight nowadays, and because of that, we need to work with statistics.

There’s no longer space to build small pipelines. In the current market, people decline our messages, go on interviews, withdraw, and reject jobs all the time.

Thus, we must have in mind that we need options. Something a large pipeline can offer.

Step 4 – Contact

Here it is where the magic happens. All those profiles we saved in our pipeline will now receive a first contact message from us.

For me, this is the most important step.

Whoever thinks this step is only about the first contact message, is making a huge mistake.

Do we want it to be personalized or not?

Is our target group expecting to receive concrete information from that first message or would they accept our message and then receive a call from us?

People are different and therefore our job here is to try to contact them in the way they prefer the most.

But it is not all about the first message, because commonly people will decline our message in the first place. Once that happens, it is our work to try to understand their reasons. It is all about controlling objections and selling a good opportunity in the right way.

And by selling, I don’t mean to push a vacancy into someone’s face who already declined my message.

But to understand their timing. Is this the opportunity, they are looking for in this moment? Do they think they are suitable for this position?

It demands a lot of time and effort from our side, because sometimes all this chatting can last more than 2 weeks.

I was in a meeting with a Hiring Manager a couple of weeks ago. After I showed him my chat with a candidate up to the moment that this candidate felt secure enough to apply for the position, the hiring manager mentioned: “but you are best friends!”.

He was surprised by our long conversation. What is hidden here is the fact that I respected the candidate’s moment, checked his doubts, and answered his questions. In other words, I understood that this candidate needed to be secure first and after it, he would be ready to apply.

Step 5 – Alignment & Closing

During all the previous steps, we have follow-up meetings with the hiring manager and recruiters. The overall idea is to update them on what we have been doing.

Those are important moments to calibrate their expectations about the market as well.

At the end of a cycle of Sourcing, for example, they are aware we need to change something in the requirements to align them better with the market.

Or that we have found a few candidates in a very niche market, so they can not be too picky about the candidates in the interviewing process.

All those steps together are the successfactor for a solid match. Jumping them will delay and even bring us ineffective and inefficient results during recruitment.