What is Sourcing?

The term sourcing is currently appearing everywhere in the recruiting world. Many companies have been doing it for a long time or plan to recruit more proactively in the near future. But what exactly is the definition of sourcing, what does it include and why is it such a hot topic? This article answers these questions and gives you the basics you need to know.

Definition of sourcing

Sourcing is the personal approach to reaching promising candidates with the aim of attracting interested parties to your company. Sourcing thus has parallels with the methods of personnel consulting. In both cases, the location of the target person is examined before they are contacted. Contacts are often made online and include employees of competing companies.

Why is sourcing so important nowadays?

It isn't a secret anymore that the recruiting world is no longer the same. This is partly due to the steady progress of digitalisation, but also to the current situation on the labor market and the sharp drop of the unemployment rate - which has fallen from 10% to 4% in the last 9 years in the US.

There is an acute shortage of skilled workers in many areas. This means that most of the promising candidates are not actively looking for jobs, but are already in a permanent position. The result is that the old approach of placing a job ad and waiting no longer works and sometimes does not bring the desired quality of applicants.

With sourcing, recruiters try to get into personal contact with these passive candidates. First of all, it must be analysed in which places the target groups can best be reached and, above all, which approach must be chosen so that the candidate is interested in another company and another job.

The importance of business network platforms and social media for sourcing

Sourcing happens mostly online. For this reason, business network platforms such as LinkedIn have enormous added value for sourcers, as they have millions of potential contacts. The same applies to social networks such as Facebook, although there is the difficulty that people are usually not registered there because of their employment or career. It is important to find out in advance which of these channels the target groups are using before contacting them.

Binding interested parties (talent pools)

Once you have gained an interested party for your company through sourcing, you should not let them leave so easily again. Even if there may not be a suitable job for him or her at the moment. The keyword here is the binding of interested parties - it should not be neglected under any circumstances.

Give your interested party the opportunity to be included in a talent pool. A talent pool is a database of candidates who are already interested in your company. This enables you to keep in touch with them through regular newsletters or current job offers and thus retain them for the long term (candidate relationship management). In building this relationship, you also have the opportunity to further build and strengthen your employer branding. Thanks to the records, you can also see exactly how the contact between you and the candidate developed. This binding of interested parties enables you to build up your own pipeline from which you can then recruit as required.

(Screenshot: Talention's talent pool)

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

Talention offers you all the elements you need to set up a talent pool on your career site that optimally binds potential candidates to you. We would be happy to show you what this process would look like in your case with a free demo. Here you can request a free demo.