AI Sourcing: Do’s and Don’ts on How to Source Talent

Employer competition remains one of the biggest concerns for recruiters today, especially in a pandemic-struck job market. Hiring teams across industries will have to learn how to source talent in more resourceful and creative ways to stand out. 

Candidates and applicants in 2021 are more likely to prioritize transparent communication, long-term employment stability, inclusive workforce, and work flexibility. Top talent won’t come knocking at your door if your competitors are doing a better job at reaching them where they are to start a conversation. 

But it’s common for recruiters to feel like their sourcing efforts are not aligned with what they’re looking for. Even after entering all the right criteria required for your open role, you might find yourself asking, “am I doing something wrong?”

As 55% of hiring teams are looking to decrease sourcing time in 2021 according to hireEZ’s 2021 Recruitment Outlook Report, not getting the results you want quickly can feel like a huge problem. 

Here are some useful do’s and don’ts on how to source talent efficiently on hireEZ so your process isn’t complicated or time-consuming. 

The Do’s

 Do Leverage Candidate Insights

Candidate insights are extremely useful for titles, skills, location, years of experience, industries, and sourcing channels. Using these insights, you can:

🧐  Evaluate, modify and refine the search
📊  Gain insights on talent distribution
📈  Maximize your candidate search in both quality and quantity

For niche and highly technical roles, candidates may also use industry jargon that may not be widely known to recruiters. Some candidates may also use job titles that are similar but not exactly the same as the title set for your open role. Read through some candidate profiles from your initial search and pull some keywords into your new search based on that information.

During your search, you may find a large percentage of the talent pool isn’t in the optimal industry. Or, you might find that the majority of candidates have a higher amount of years of experience than expected.

Do Analyze Market Insights Before Starting a Challenging Search

🗺  Quickly evaluate the available candidate market and do a talent mapping exercise for strategic sourcing.
🛠  Present this report to your hiring manager for setting expectations or to propose what is needed to change or amend in terms of the candidate persona parameters. 

When you’re ready, start a new AI search based on the reports gathered from your market insights.

Do Use Advanced and Hidden Filters

Each sourcing tool has its own set of unique filters, so get creative! 🎨

➡️  Excluded locations: For example, when you’re sourcing a whole country as the location, but don’t want candidates from specific states or cities, you can leverage the “excluded locations”.  

➡️  Extended search/Saved Lists of Target Companies: Simply type in any company and hireEZ will generate companies similar to those based on your input. You can also choose to save a list of target companies if you have a list of companies that you typically source from or exclude from your searches. 

➡️  Excluded from Industries: You should refer to your candidate insights to gain an overview of all the industries which are on the list and exclude those unwanted ones.

The Don’ts 

Don’t Use Too Many Mandatory Skills

Remove a few skills that aren’t “deal breakers” and focus on the most important skill(s) to ensure that it appears in a candidate’s profile.

“Preferred Skills” are nice-to-haves that will expand your talent pool and show candidates who have one or more of these preferred skills. From here, you can rank candidates based on how many preferred skills they have.

Don’t Ignore Sample Candidates or Candidate Insights 

Don’t Underestimate the Power of  Tools 👀

When you come across a candidate’s profile that is qualified for the role, hireEZ will compare the candidate’s location, title, skills, experience, and available contact information to other possible candidates in the pool. Then, hireEZ will offer three similar candidates for you to choose from. This is especially useful if your ideal candidate is not available to hire right now or if you need to find multiple qualified candidates for a highly specific role.

hireEZ Chrome Extension now works on LinkedIn (and LinkedIn Recruiter), Twitter, GitHub, Kaggle, Stack Overflow, Google Scholar, and Google Searches.

Get started with our Chrome Extension.

Who’s Ready to Get Started?

The AI Sourcing filters can be combined and applied in many different ways to successfully find candidates for an infinite number of roles. Explore these different filter combinations and feature applications to optimize your search results and hone in on your ideal candidate persona!

If you’re not a hireEZ customer, connect with our sales team today.