Sourcing in IT Recruiting: What You Should Know

The direct approach in recruiting, also known as sourcing, is when one person uses personal contact to win over a candidate for a company. Within the IT sector in particular, this is the most common and promising method for finding candidates. In this article, you will find out what you should consider in terms of sourcing in IT recruiting.

The direct approach in modern recruiting

The concept of a direct approach is becoming increasingly important because of the current state of the labor market. The labor market has changed dramatically in recent years. As recently as 2009, the U.S. had an unemployment rate of 10%. As a result, candidates were actively seeking employment and would undertake a cumbersome application process to find a job.

There is now an unemployment rate of only 4%. This means that the behavior of the candidate has also changed. Today's candidate is not actively seeking but is in permanent employment. The passive candidates can only be convinced by an added value that their current employer does not offer.

First, find out where the desired candidates are. Which channels are the right ones to reach your target audience?

Sourcing in IT recruiting

The next step is to find the right approach. IT professionals are mostly passive candidates. They are demanding and are already in employment. Since they receive several job offers every day, do not use a standard approach. They expect that the recruiter has studied their profile before contacting them and therefore the approach should be suitable and sound. It takes a lot of human effort to identify suitable candidates for a profile.

If the approach has piqued the interest of the candidate, it must be ensured that your entire employer profile is professional. The candidate will visit your career page and your job listings. Therefore, it is imperative that they are designed attractively and convince the candidate in a further step.

If you don't analyze, document and evaluate this information, you'll need to start from scratch to recruit. You won't collect any empirical values and won't build up any know-how.

Screenshot: Example of the performance data of a job advertisement in Talention's campaign management. Here you can read in the overview how many clicks were made on your job advertisement.

With analysis, you will build up knowledge that will help you in future recruitment. Get more quality applications and get started by following the tips above.

The entire process of direct contact in recruiting is very intensive and time-consuming, but essential in IT recruiting. Therefore, we would like to show you some possibilities that you can use to accompany the direct approach.

SEO

Make sure your job listings are search engine optimized so you can find them on job search engines or on Google. By utilizing SEO, you have the opportunity to use Google as a free channel.

Free channels

Free job boards can provide you with the desired qualitative candidates. However, you should also monitor how successful this campaign is for you.

It is important that you place your job advertisement on the right channels. Analyze on which channels your target group is active. And note that passive candidates are not on the usual job boards, but rather can be reached by passive channels.

Example passive channels are social media sites such as Facebook and Linkedin. You can find detailed instructions for placing ads on LinkedIn here. The desired target group can be filtered and the appropriate advertisements can be displayed. This will also attract the attention of candidates who are not actively looking for a job.

Engage with interested candidates (Talent Network)

Unfortunately, the attention of interested candidate is often not given enough thought.

What happens if a suitable candidate visits your career page but there isn't a fitting job available? Don't just let them go and lose contact. Rather, you should give the candidate the opportunity to sign up for a talent network. You can keep in touch with regular newsletters or current job offers and thus retain the candidates.

Through this engagement, you build your own pipeline, from which you can then recruit.

Check out our page "The Ultimate Guide to Candidate Sourcing" to find further resources on the topic of candidate sourcing.

A recruiting marketing software can help you to understand and evaluate the different channels and approaches. We are happy to show you in a free demo what the implementation for your company can look like. You can request a free demo here.