How Vital is Social Sourcing for Talent Acquisition?

You are a recruiter who is over-burdened with meeting deadlines for hiring candidates. The sourcing companies are basically dependent on the candidates’ responses and must wait until you get in touch with the prospects of a good candidate. What is the probability of getting the referrals of good candidates and then hiring them for your company? Trifling!

The chances are almost obscure for acquiring the types of candidates that you desire, let alone the resources and the valuable time wasted in the searching process. But, you should not be really frustrated with the process as there is a solution. So, what is the solution? Social sourcing.

Surfing through the social media sites: Isn’t it the first and the last thing you do consciously or unconsciously every day? Yes, you go through the various pages of your social media accounts to stay updated about the things going on around you. Can you sense about that one thing that makes these social platforms such good sources of networking? Yes, you got it right, the size of the audience. With about 2.2 million active users in Facebook, 800 million in Instagram, 260 million in LinkedIn, 1.5 billion in YouTube, and 330 million in Twitter, the largest crowd that you can expect to have gathered is in the social media sites.

Now, you will be eager to know about the percentage of the job seekers present in these social media sites. Well, seventy-nine percentage of job seekers are actively using social media sites with the intention of finding job opportunities.

So, the typical strategy for acquiring talent that looked somewhat like this: the sourcing services putting out notice for hiring efficient and desired candidates, and managers relying on their candidates to get in touch with the expected candidates, thereby losing energy and resources. And now, with the advent of social media sites where you can easily search for candidates, the process has become exceedingly convenient. Specifically thanking the modern-day technologies and practices for hiring, social sourcing can be easily considered as the most vital strategy for acquiring talent currently.

 

Let’s look at the benefits of using social sourcing strategy for finding new and efficient candidates.

• Social sourcing is widespread. Both big, as well as small companies, are actively using the strategy of social sourcing for recruiting candidates. They are basically using this strategy as a recruiting solution for finding the best of the best candidates among the crowd. According to the statistics of Jobcast, about ninety-three percent of the organizations are using this strategy for recruiting candidates, and about seventy-three percent of them have already hired candidates from social media sites. There is also a news of improvement in candidate’s quality since they have hired them from social sites. Workers commonly work in LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. As social sites become increasingly integrated with the daily lives of people, social sourcing strategies will continue to expand. This is mainly focused on the companies who are currently jumping on board and making it the primary part of their recruitment plans. These sourcing companies will surely find the social sourcing strategies advantageous as these sole strategies will help these companies to stay competitive in today’s economy of employee-driven prospects.
• Candidates can conveniently apply for new job positions. Social sourcing is not only beneficial for the recruiters but, for the employees as well. There are several tools for recruitment, and these tools, when combined with the sourcing strategy, allows the employee to go through the company’s employer brand. This makes them even more convenient for the employees to search for the available roles and know if they can really apply for the position, they believe they fit in. All these employers will require to do is log into the platforms of HR recruiting tools, maintain the accurate profile, and post the required position to plea to the leading candidates. Social sourcing strategies highly enable the companies to put their strategy of finding talent a step forward, build a network in between great talents, and get in touch only with the desired candidates. The sole motive of this strategy is to direct the best possible employees who can effectively bring a positive bottom line for the company.
• Automatically reach out to the candidates in their network. The only intention of social media is to build a connection between people. Building network between employers and would be employees and creating a talent pool is an important perspective that social sourcing strategy has presented to the present generation. And, when these recruitments are done with the recruitment tools, it creates a blast. This combination allows both employers and employees to seamlessly and automatically locate each other within their networks. When recruiters post a job on the social sites, they effectively eliminate the middlemen, who would have otherwise charged some amount for finding the relevant employees. This also enables the employers to attract the outstanding personalities already present within the network. This narrows down the resources required and cuts down the time, thereby allowing the recruiters to schedule interview as quickly as possible.
• Social sourcing helps in having a transparency at both the ends. A two- or three-page resume cannot serve as the ultimatum for satisfying the quest of the recruiters. Instead, the quest can be satisfied by engaging the candidates in a conversation before actually selecting them for an interview. When the recruiters go through the profile of the candidates, they get to know more about their skills and abilities. This helps the recruiter gain more insights and stir up an engaging conversation with the selected employees. Besides providing detailed information about the selected candidates, the recruiters can also get invaluable information and have positive or negative insights about the personalities of the candidates. The vice versa happens when the candidates also gain knowledge if the company is genuine with its recruitment and culture. A good flow of the interview can be built when both ends know each other to some extent, and this can effectively brew up a soothing environment and a comfortable relationship.

Social sourcing strategies can be effectively utilized by sourcing services to find effective candidates. This can save resources and time and add value to the organization.