How to source a quality candidate pipeline

proactive recruiting

Contents

3 Introduction

5 Four great reasons to engage top talent through sourcing

7 Make sourcing a team sport

8 The hunt: Where to uncover great talent

10 Tips for nurturing your talent pipeline

12 Measure and improve your sourcing efforts

14 Conclusion

15 About Lever

This is a guide for every employee dedicated to building a top talent team: recruiters, founders, hiring managers, and beyond.

We’ll cover how to grow recruiting from an administrative, process-oriented function to a strategic one that prioritizes finding the best talent and crafting the perfect candidate ex-perience. If you’re investing too much time in a low quality, high volume pipeline, or feel like you’re losing momentum with every new job posting when you should be building an industry-leading employer brand, read on.

Introduction

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T oo often, we mistake a high volume pipeline for a high quality one. It feels easy to post a

job description on multiple job boards and wait for the applications to flow in. But in today’s competitive job market – where even companies like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn have open-ings left unfilled for months – top talent won’t be falling into your lap any time soon.

The majority of candidates in a high volume

pipeline will be average or unqualified, while the best candidates may resent the assembly line experience and lose interest or accept another offer. Ultimately, a recruiting process designed to manage volume caters to mediocrity – it weeds unqualified talent out but also drives top talent away.

However, attracting top talent isn’t just desir-able, it’s essential. If you want to be the best in your product category and secure your compa-ny’s future, you have to hire the best people in the industry to help you get there.

So how do you find top talent? Rather than focusing on screening out the low-quality can-didates, direct your efforts toward strategically sourcing and engaging the best talent.

Sourcing is proactively searching for and engaging qualified talent to fill your company’s current or future positions.

Only 25% of the workforce is actively looking for a new opportunity at any given time, but 85% is willing to talk and learn more1. Sourcing allows you to tap into hidden talent so you can find the best candidates – whether or not they’re actually on the job market.

Job postings result in quantity. Sourcing produces quality.

1 Source: The Simple Numbers That Could Change How You Hire

Only 25% of the workforce is actively looking for a new opportunity at any given time, but 85% is willing to talk and learn more.

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Four great reasons to engage top talent through sourcing

Proactively sourcing candidates requires a mindshift away from the volume-based recruiting methods of the past and toward a more person-alized recruitment experience for top candidates. It may seem counterin-tuitive to spend more time on fewer candidates, but focusing on the best talent will help you hire the best talent.

Here are four clear benefits you can expect to reap by switching to proactively sourcing candidates:

1. You’ll see better candidate quality

Your new recruiting mantra: Quality, not quantity. Your search for the best candidates is a directed one: a concentrated effort in a competitive market, not “spray and pray.”

Directing your efforts toward strategically sourcing top candidates, rather than spending time weeding out high volumes of average candidates, will allow you to give each of them the personalized attention they need to choose your company.

With fewer candidates in your pipeline, you will have more time to get to know each one and build meaningful relationships with them. You will learn their motivations, and they’ll learn more about your team and what it would be like to be part of it. Personalized attention will keep your candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process and, over time, will assure the candidate that your com-pany is where they want to work. Then, when the time comes to make an offer, you will have the best candidates to choose from. Top candidates have their choice of companies to work for, so you have to be on your game if you want to win the top performers to your team.

Once you get into the habit of recruiting high-qual-ity candidates, it will become easier to recruit more – top talent attracts top talent. Your candidates aren’t just evaluating your career opportunity and hiring manager, they’re evaluating your entire team. Great candidates want to work for, and alongside, colleagues who will complement them, challenge them, and allow them to do their best work. When a candidate feels that they would be part of a success-

Your search for the best candi-dates is a directed one: a con-centrated effort in a competitive market, not “spray and pray.”

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ful team, helping to build a successful company, they will be more enthusiastic about coming on board.

2. You’ll improve candidate experience

Focusing on top talent and providing each candidate with personalized attention also improves your candidate experience. While a high-volume pipeline requires you to archive and reject candidates in bulk, a quality pipeline lets you focus on nurturing candidates until they’re ready to make a move. Each candidate will feel more like a respected recruit than one of many faceless candidates – helping you stand out as a potential employer and as a hiring team with a brand.

3. You’ll strengthen your employer brand

With an improvement in the candidate expe-rience also comes an improvement in your employer brand. People want to work for a com-pany that treats its candidates and employees

with respect. As your employer brand improves, so will your ability to hire more great talent.

4. You’ll ultimately decrease time to fill

At the outset, proactively reaching out to people who haven’t voiced an interest in your company can feel daunting and time-consuming. But once you’ve laid the initial groundwork, with ongoing sourcing and nurturing, you will have a candidate pipeline full of qualified talent to choose from when you have a position to fill. This allows you to begin interviewing the moment a position opens up, or after another candidate declines an offer. Rather than having to start over with a dry pipeline, you will have quality candidates ready to go. While other teams are plagued by talent shortages, you will be able to reduce your time to fill newly opened roles.

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W hether your organization has an in-house team or not, it’s critical that your hiring

managers get involved with sourcing candi-dates. Only they truly know what mix of hard and soft skills they’re looking for in their next hire – making them the most qualified to source candidates.

Hiring managers are also the most qualified to nurture candidates. Rather than repeating talking points, hiring managers can authentical-ly explain the role to candidates, and share what makes the team special. They can speak to their candidate’s motivations and describe what your company and open role can offer.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, hiring managers can build meaningful relationships

Make sourcing a team sport

Marketers can hire better marketers, designers can spot a great designer from miles away, and developers find better developers, period.

with their top choice candidates. Both the candidate and the hiring manager

will learn whether they communicate well, have similar problem-solving styles, and will comple-ment one another. Since they will be working together closely, building a strong hiring man-ager-candidate relationship early on will be a good indication of a solid manager-direct report relationship on the job.

By turning your hiring managers into sourcers, you’ll fill your pipeline full of quality candidates faster and deliver a more compelling experience for your candidates.

Only hiring managers truly know what mix of hard and soft skills they’re looking for in their next hire – making them the most qualified to source candidates.

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GitHub

GitHub is a web-based repository hosting service where developers often open source their work. It’s a great place to source software engineers, who demonstrate their skills on the site.

Dribbble

Dribbble is an online community for designers to showcase their work, and may include web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers, and other creative candidates.

T he most strategic sourcers overcome this problem by investing the time to make their

messaging resonate (see the next section) and diversifying their sourcing channels, allowing them to find candidates that can’t be found anywhere else.

LinkedIn is an obvious starting point, but there are many other sites to consider, including the following:

AngelList

AngelList is a free platform that connects startups to job candidates and investors. The recruitment side of the platform allows users to request an introduction to either a candidate or a company and notifies them when there’s mutual interest. AngelList is a great place to find developers, designers, and candidates interested in working at startups.

The hunt: where to uncover great talent

In some ways it has never been easier to find talent than it is today online. But finding the people to contact is just the starting point. As proactive sourcing becomes more popular, there is more compe-tition for the same candidates, who can become overwhelmed by the volume of inquiries they receive. As a result, some candidates stop reading messages on half the sites where they’ve published an online profile.

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easily pull candidates into your pipe-

line with lever’s chrome extension (link)

Lever has built sourcing functionality directly into its system so that anyone on your team can do one-click imports from candidate profiles on the web. Our Chrome browser extension will automatically extract candidate information from each of the tools listed in this section, with the click of a button.

Facebook

Facebook has a powerful built-in search engine to help you uncover candidates who have spe-cific work experience listed in their profiles, or who post content about topics you’re interested in. Facebook can also be useful for sourcers who want to find people connected to their current employees, or who work for their competitors.

Twitter

Twitter is the third largest social network, behind Facebook and LinkedIn, and also has a powerful search engine to help you discover candidates who use their profile for personal branding. You can search profiles and tweets to find a variety of candidates, but Twitter is prime hunting ground for sales and marketing talent.

Sourcing.io

Sourcing.io is a paid sourcing tool that compiles public web data to find software engineers, and uses an algorithm and filters to help you identify

the best ones for your company.

Xing

Xing is the European-equivalent of LinkedIn and can be a great place to find talent if you’re expanding internationally.

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Learn candidate motivations

Remember, this isn’t an interview, so your initial conversations with a candidate should be exploratory and center on their career motiva-tions. What do they like about their current role? What would they change about it? What are their longer-term career goals?

If you think the candidate would be success-ful on your team, explain to them why. Even if

you don’t have a role for them in the immediate future, you want them to want to work at your company so you can hire them when the time is right.

Tips for nurturing your talent pipeline

Sourcing great candidates is only the beginning of a proactive re-cruitment process. Regardless of whether or not a potential candi-date is looking to make a move, bring them into the loop. You can’t start nurturing a potential lead too soon. Take the time to get to know them, and sell them on the vision of your company, the mis-sion, and the team. When the time’s right, you’ll be the first person they’ll call. Follow these guidelines to maximize your chances of success:

snooze candidates with lever (link)

In Lever you can “snooze” passive candidates who are not yet ready to chat, and receive email and calendar reminders as they’re “wak-ing up” so you know when it’s time to check back in. Add notes to your snoozed candidates so you can pick up the conversation from where you left off. If you follow up in a rele-vant and timely manner, your top candidates will never fall through the cracks again.

Candidates who may not be interested in making a move now may feel dif-ferently in 6 months.

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Follow up consistently

Follow up with candidates in your talent pipe-line on a regular basis to keep them engaged with your company. Stay up to date on changes in their career. Keep them in the loop about company news and job openings. Reinforce why your company is a good fit for them by circling back on their motivations.

Gone are the days of approaching recruiting as an administrative function designed to cope with volume and move candidates through a pipeline.

Top talent is in such high demand that it’s essential to be more strategic and build long-term relationships. Candidates who may not be interested in making a move now may feel differently in six months. Or, even if they’re not interested, they may refer someone who is – so it can’t hurt to check in with them regularly.

Personalize your outreach

When you reach out to candidates, continue building a relationship with them by personal-izing your communications. Track each of your previous conversations so you can reference them in future communications, and coordinate outreach with the rest of your team to ensure that they’re not overwhelmed with multiple mes-sages at a time. You’ll never have to ask, “Who was the last person to talk to this candidate?” again.

For instance, if a candidate says they aren’t interested in your position right now because they’re looking forward to a new product launch with their current company, follow up after the expected launch date to ask how it went. This gives you the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the candidate and potentially reach them at a time when they’d be ready to consider making a move. It’s all about the personal touch.

syncing candidate emails and internal

communication with lever (link)

Your applicant tracking system (ATS) can be the source of truth, where every detail and touch point about a candidate is recorded and shared. Lever’s email sync will ensure that all candidate communication is automatically stored in the candidate’s profile so you always know which member of your team has reached out, and what was said. You will also be able to see internal notes between members of your team. Never spend another second worrying if you have the most up-to-date information about a candidate – when it comes to hiring, Lever is your single source of truth.

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Measure and improve your sourcing efforts

Measuring the success of your sourcing efforts not only proves the value of your high quality candidate pipeline, it also uncovers ar-eas for improvement.

Measuring the success of your sourcing efforts not only proves the value of your high quality candidate pipeline, it also uncovers areas for improvement.

You may need to adjust some of your tra-ditional key performance indicators as you increase your proactive sourcing efforts. For example, time to hire will initially increase as you engage candidates before they’re ready to interview, and you may have fewer candidates interviewing at any given time. In the end, though, you’ll see a much higher quality of can-didates going through your recruitment process, and time-based metrics should steadily improve as you develop a pipeline of warm talent.

Rather than focus on your old key perfor-mance indicators, track these new KPIs instead:

Pipeline speed

Overall, your time to hire will increase if you track candidates from the time they’re entered into your ATS. That’s because an applicant coming into your ATS is ready to interview immediately, while a sourced candidate may need to be nurtured before they’re ready to begin

interviewing.To put the two on an even playing field, start

tracking your pipeline speed – the time it takes to hire a candidate from the first interview, all the way through to offer acceptance.

It’s a good idea to optimize for a faster pipe-line speed whenever possible. And while some candidates, or certain positions, may require a longer recruitment process, this metric should remain fairly consistent.

If you see that your pipeline speed is in-creasing over time, or that pipeline speed for a specific candidate is longer than average, you should look into why. Are candidates getting stuck in one particular phase of your recruitment process? Is each phase taking longer than usual?

Once you identify any issues with your recruitment process, you should take immediate steps to correct them. A long recruitment process can cause candidates to become disinterested and drop out, or may give other employers an opportunity to recruit your top choice candi-date. To avoid this, it’s important to track your pipeline speed metric in real-time, so you can immediately address any challenges.

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Feedback score distribution

When a candidate is in the early stages of your interview process, it’s okay to see interview feedback scores all across the board. This is totally natural -- assessing candidates based on written responses or over the phone is challeng-ing for even the most experienced interviewers.

As you reach the final interview stages, how-ever, you’ll want to see mostly aligned, positive feedback scores from interviewers. Not because your interviewers are generous, but because you’ve actually brought the best candidates onsite. It’s part of the screening process to weed out the candidates who simply won’t be a good fit, no matter how many members of your team they meet with.

If you’re seeing a wide distribution of feed-back scores late in the recruitment process, you should figure out why. Are you being too lenient in moving candidates to the next phase of the recruitment process? Are certain interviewers scoring candidates too generously, or too harsh-ly? Tracking your feedback score distribution helps you improve your screening process so only the best candidates move to the next step.

When scores become more consistently posi-tive, it means you are sourcing and interviewing the best candidates.

Offer acceptance rates

Once you’ve sourced and interviewed a great candidate, the final moment of truth comes when you submit your offer. If your top prospect rejects your offer, you may have to re-open your search and take up even more of your team’s time.

This makes it critical to track your offer ac-ceptance rate. The percentage of candidates who accept your offers can be a good gauge of how effective your recruitment process is. At the end

of the day, your goal is to hire a great candidate for your open role. If you’re not hiring your top choice candidates, you need to figure out why so you can do something about it.

A low offer acceptance rate could be due to a number of different issues, so it’s best to directly ask for feedback. Understanding the reason candidates declined your offer may help you screen better, or may help you make stronger offers in the future.

A high offer acceptance rate will help you prove the value of sourcing because it means that you’ve adequately screened, and built rela-tionships with, candidates. A great recruitment process ensures a great fit for both the candidate and the employer, making it more likely that an offer will be accepted.

diagnose opportunities for sourcing

improvement via lever (link)

Use Lever’s powerful and customizable reporting tools to assess and report out on your sourcing effectiveness. Since recruiting results can vary significantly from person to person, you can drill down by individual to compare performance across the team. Figure out who’s having the most success and grill them for best practices!

A great team can give you a competitive edge – both in terms of hiring and hitting company goals – but building one is easier said than done. While applicants are plentiful, those who are exceptional are in short supply.

To win the best talent, you need to focus on proactive sourcing to find top-tier candidates, whether they’re on the market or not. Sourcing allows you to tap into hidden talent pools that you wouldn’t be able to access through other re-cruitment methods, so you know you’re recruiting the best talent out there. By proactively sourcing candidates, you are in complete control of the quality of talent in your pipeline.

With a smaller pipeline of high quality candidates, you can ensure that each is nurtured and has a great experience with your company. That way, when a candidate is ready to make a move, you’re the first person they call. Building strong relationships with each individual candidate is key to earning their interest and, ultimately, bringing them on to your team. If you want the best talent on the market, it won’t come easily – but the outcome will be well worth the effort.

To win the competition for the best talent on the market, be proactive. Top-tier talent is within reach for your team.

Conclusion

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About Lever

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in downtown San Francisco, Lever is the world’s first truly collaborative applicant tracking system. We’ve designed our software to be easy, intuitive, data-driven and hiring manager-friendly.

Lever supports hundreds of companies around the world in proactive-ly sourcing, nurturing and hiring the right talent. Among the factors that make Lever different from traditional ATS products:

ATS meets CRM. As well as including all the functionality you’d expect in an applicant tracking system, designed to be more intuitive, Lever offers comprehensive tools to help you nurture passive talent until they’re ready to become candidates.

Built for collaboration. As your company grows, half the battle is keeping everybody on the same page. Lever helps hiring managers and recruiters stay in sync through multiple features like @ mentions, job following and two-way email sync.

Candidate-centric. To increase your chances of success with a candidate, it pays to have a complete view of their every interaction with your team. See your company’s full history with each candidate over time, helping you personalize your outreach and improve their impressions of your organization.

We’d love to show you why hiring teams are raving about Lever. For a free demo, email sales@lever.co, call +1.415.458.2731, or visit https://lever.co.