Articles 
Though someone might not be the right fit for your organization today, they could be the ideal candidate in the future, so there are significant benefits to building out pipelines of engaged talent ahead of business demand.
In fact, 84 percent of large organizations already have a direct sourcing tool in place or are looking to implement one within the next two years.
From initial candidate search to engagement and database management, automated talent sourcing can help busy teams activate an effective strategy at scale, reducing the typical burden that falls on sourcers and recruiters that rely on manual processes. Read on to discover three game-changing best practices.
1. Enrich Your Pipelines with Talent Sourcing
Your team can’t afford to waste time going through piles of unprocessed and irrelevant resumes. Imagine if you could skip this process and just receive a pile of the best candidates at the start of the process.
Automated searches can fill your pipelines with candidates based on any pre-set criteria of your choosing. Schedule searches on Avature WebSources to run automatically every night, searching any job boards you define, and your recruiters will wake up to hundreds of fresh candidates. Outreach can also be automated to start engagement without adding extra workload for recruiters and sourcers.
To focus efforts on the most qualified candidates you source, adding knock-out questions can be very effective. It can also help speed up the hiring process and avoid candidates “dying on the vine.” GPS Hospitality introduced knock-out questions to automatically move qualified talent onto the interview step, helping them avoid missing out on the most relevant candidates.
In addition to smart automation features, the best candidate relationship management solutions in the market offer transparent AI capabilities that can help speed up the talent sourcing process even further. This is especially crucial when 75 percent of the resumes received for a role are unqualified.
For example, Avature’s Recommended Candidates feature suggests leads that might be a good match for your pipelines. The suggested candidates are ranked according to how closely their profiles match your requirements. However, they will not be linked to your pipelines unless you decide to do so.
The feature allows recruiters to see the reasoning behind the recommendation and even adjust the criteria to grant full transparency and assist the decision-making process.
2. Design Drip Campaigns That Keep Talent Engaged
The most successful talent sourcers know that candidates don’t just want to be contacted about open positions, especially if they’ve made it clear that they aren’t interested in a new opportunity at this time. Instead, the best in the game focus on sharing compelling content showcasing their employer brand and unique value proposition to nurture the relationship.
Research shows that 66 percent of candidates trust employees more than companies. Your employees are your best spokespersons, so sharing their testimonials in your campaigns can really help position your organization as an employer of choice in the minds of your candidates. Choosing your employees and customers to be the voice that speaks to talent will already set you apart.
Regarding what you want to convey, talent appreciates helpful advice related to their careers and professional development, so content such as interview tips, key industry trends and insights into what employers are looking for can help convey that your company cares about people and their journeys. Tailoring your communication to each candidate is critical for successful talent sourcing.
To ensure your content really resonates, you should be segmenting your audience and sending each group relevant materials. One of the main reasons Avature stands out is that there’s no field within the system that I can’t use to personalize outreach or use as a filter so I can scale up or scale down based on the volume of candidates I want to reach out to.”
Jason Boone, Recruiting Expert
People used to think about personalization as “I put your name in an email.” But candidates now have much higher expectations, and sourcers must think more strategically if they want to resonate. The best candidate engagement technology empowers sourcers to take advantage of any data field to personalize communications.
By combining powerful sourcing automation and comprehensive segmentation tools, talent sourcing teams can activate impactful drip campaigns for different audience segments without the heavy workload such a strategy would imply without automation.
As new generations enter the talent market, innovative sourcers are also looking to tap into new channels and technology as engagement soars when you meet candidates where they spend their time. Beyond email, you might want to consider how you can activate SMS or WhatsApp campaigns.
Automated communication can also help with the interview process, streamlining scheduling by prompting internal stakeholders to share their availability through a bespoke scheduling portal. Candidates can then self-schedule a slot that best suits them.
3. Stay Compliant with Automated Talent Sourcing
Apart from bringing candidates into your database and engaging them with segmented and personalized campaigns, there are many other opportunities for sourcing automation to support hiring teams in their day-to-day activities.
Due to the sensitive nature of handling personal data, organizations need processes in place to manage it accordingly. Automated workflows can be configured to handle your compliance needs —whether that’s GDPR, PIPL, CCPA, or any other privacy regulations or legal requirement.
Mettler Toledo is a very global organization, so it was extremely important to have a system in place that also supports our data privacy regulations. We have companies and units in Germany, China and the US, so you can imagine the needs are extremely different. Having a flexible data privacy workflow in place, Avature really helped us tackle those challenges.” – Hannah Kratka, Head of Quality, Efficiency and Innovation at Mettler Toledo.
If your organization operates in multiple regions, like Mettler Toledo, a highly configurable workflow engine that can be configured to accommodate local regulations on a global scale is invaluable.
When it comes to demonstrating team performance, automation can also help with timely reporting. Instead of building manual reports and sending them with a regular cadence, the process can be automated with the right technology, saving your team significant time while ensuring all stakeholders have visibility of the strategic impact of your talent sourcing initiatives. Metro Bank saved each of its recruiters three hours a week since taking advantage of Avature automation to speed up the reporting process.
To Conclude
At Avature, we have many conversations with the recruitment teams at leading enterprise organizations who are deciding whether or not to invest in a recruiting CRM. And one of the key factors that tends to tip the balance is the transformational impact of automated talent sourcing.
In today’s tight candidate market, technology that enables you to drive efficiency while enhancing the experience of all stakeholders has the power to become your competitive advantage quickly. And automation has a powerful multiplier effect. Beyond freeing teams from the burden of administrative tasks, it enables an important shift in the type of activities they spend their time on. And these higher-value tasks, such as nurturing candidates, translate directly into better hiring outcomes.
