Attracting the best job applicants is essential to the future of any organization. If you’re hoping to come out ahead of the competition, you need the best talent available to help you get there. Workopolis reports that employers have revealed as many as three-quarters of applicants for a particular role aren’t qualified, and only a fraction of the remainder actually make it to the interview.
Finding the top talent is unlikely to simply fall into your lap. You have to know how to source the best applicants, and these are some of the best ways to do it.
Get an ATS
An applicant tracking system, or ATS, is comprehensive talent acquisition software. These systems have been helping companies locate and hire better applicants since the 1990s. As technology has significantly evolved since then, so have those systems. They can manage, track, measure, and automate, easing the time burden that hiring requires. They’ve become more useful and more intelligent in recent years, helping to select the top candidates and getting more insight into the entire process.
An ATS can integrate with different job boards, reduce the amount of time it takes to apply for a job to decrease drop-off rates, thin out the candidate pool by setting minimum requirements like education and years of experience and even provide cognitive and personality assessments that gauge relevant skills as well as potential conflicts. And that’s just a start.
Provide a Great Experience to All Candidates So That You Have a Good Future Pool
By devoting the time and effort to source quality talent, in addition to ending up with a good hire, you’ll have a pool of candidates qualified for future roles. It’s important to be able to leverage your past efforts by beginning searches with candidates that have already invested time and have been deemed qualified to work at your company. To do this, you need to provide a great experience to all candidates so that they’ll want to re-engage and have a system that makes it easy to find them again.
Candidates who have previously applied to a company are four times more likely to respond to outreach from a recruiter at that organization, according to statistics. If they were initially declined, they’ll be more likely to re-apply for other openings in the future if they were notified as well, so be sure and keep them apprised of their application status. When they’re declined, if you offer constructive feedback, it also increases the odds that they’ll be interested in future opportunities.
Don’t Just Use Your Go-To Channels, Think Outside the Box
Most recruiters have their go-to channels for sourcing candidates, such as their professional network, LinkedIn, etc. But you’ll also want to look into some less frequently fished sources. Perhaps source talent where your target audience is hanging out online, such as Github for developers or Behance for creatives. You can capture the attention of good talent by showing what your company is doing while revealing the reasons they should work there.
