Making the Shift to Direct Sourcing 2.0

Direct sourcing is taking the talent industry by storm as organizations seek faster and cheaper hiring solutions. With proper execution, self-sourcing fosters long-term candidate relationships, eliminating the legal hurdles of talent re-engagement. By creating a consistent candidate experience, you promote company culture to optimize productivity. But with the evolving labor market, there’s a need for intensive talent assessment for more quality candidates. Here’s how to transition to direct sourcing 2.0.

Take Advantage of AI

Artificial intelligence may not replace hiring managers, but it goes a long way in easing the recruitment workload. You also save time. By streamlining high-volume tasks, AI accelerates recruitment without any additions to your hiring team. What’s more, artificial intelligence facilitates standardization to improve the quality of hires. Technology also brings fairness to direct sourcing. Because it’s designed to be objective, artificial intelligence eliminates conscious and unconscious bias to deliver the most qualified candidates.

AI has various recruitment applications. The first one is background verification. You may have to reach out to other people to confirm a candidate’s abilities. AI gathers the necessary contact information and sends out questionnaires and emails to the applicant’s referees. Another capability is digitized interviews. Some programs can gauge a candidate’s suitability based on their speech patterns, facial expressions, and word choices.  

Streamlined Communication

To improve the candidate experience, your communication with applicants can touch on career aspirations, employee values, and desired work culture. Apart from what you say to candidates, the how and the when also matters. There are several ways to streamline communication when self-sourcing. First, map out your engagements at various recruitment stages and determine whether you need verbal or written communication.

Likewise, assign communication roles to specific team members to avoid confusion. Your system can also automate emails at different recruitment levels to save time and reduce errors. Don’t forget to track communications with candidates and your hiring team for ease of reference.

Repeatable Direct Sourcing Strategies Across Your Business

Regardless of your talent needs, self-sourcing isn’t something you rush into. You can introduce the strategy to one department before moving to critical sections of your business. Focus on creating a valuable experience for this group, making sure to act on feedback.

As the strategy takes shape, include other departments and announce your successes across the company. Managers are likely to adopt self-sourcing if it works for other departments.

Understand Your Needs

Self-soucing success begins with evaluating your current and future openings. Furthermore, understand your candidates’ abilities, behaviors, and driving forces, and base your strategy on them. Do you want to improve your direct sourcing program? Contact us to develop a winning strategy.