Why Do We Need a Sourcing Automation Tool?

13 hours – the average  time taken by recruiters to source candidates for one role. Imagine how hectic sourcing can be while hiring for multiple roles. Tight deadlines could also force you to move forward with hiring without being assured about the quality of the sourced candidates. And the last thing you would ever want as a recruiter is a failed hire. In order to scale quality talent sourcing and hire better candidates, a sourcing automation tool can be a game-changing solution.

Amidst today’s competitive landscape, finding talent pools consisting of skilled, experienced and interested candidates is a mammoth task. Automating the sourcing helps you target diverse talent clusters and keep your pipeline ever-ready. So that you don’t need to panic whenever requirements arise.

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Finding quality talent is the first and key step to successful hiring. However, the dynamics of the recruitment industry have changed. You now need to source passively to add valuable talent to your teams. Let’s find out why you need a sourcing automation tool for streamlining your hiring journey.

All You Need to Know about Candidate Sourcing Automation

To hire quality talent, you need to optimize your recruitment journey bottom-up. Effective hiring can be convenient too – only if you have set up systems in place.

Automating candidate sourcing cuts off the heavy manual work of recruiters. From finding the right candidates, managing talent pipeline and candidate outreach to engagement – a candidate sourcing automation tool handles everything for you. With the core aim of scaling quality talent sourcing, automation can immensely help you hire fast and efficiently. So that you not only hire better, but you fill your talent pipeline for your organization’s future long-term objectives as well!

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Wondering why you should source proactively? Fair question. 

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LinkedIn reports that over 90% of the workforce is interested in learning about new opportunities but only 36% of candidates actively search for a job. That further suggests you are missing out on two-thirds of the potential candidates while just relying on job posts.

Answering your question – sourcing passive candidates is the way forward to sustain a business. Candidate sourcing automation helps you execute your hiring strategy effectively and save a lot of time by automating the mundane recruitment tasks like managing, monitoring and continuously updating the talent pipeline, and candidate engagement.

What are the Differences between Manual and Automated Sourcing?

A number of strategies exist when it comes to recruitment. You can post your job openings on numerous job boards and wait for candidates to apply for your job. The success rate, in this case, depends on various factors – your employer brand, job posting platform, attractive job description and more.

On the other hand, you can directly find talented candidates and reach out to them to find out if they’re interested in switching jobs. 

Now here’s an interesting stat - the average number of unemployed people per job opening ratio was 0.6 in December 2021 against 1.6 a year earlier. This clearly conveys that there’s exceptional demand for talent, however, the supply is limited. Let’s now find out how automated candidate sourcing differs from manual sourcing.

Manual Sourcing

Distribution of job postings needs to be done manually

All applications are not assessed in most cases

You need to find candidates one by one and add them to your pipeline

Interacting and engaging with candidates takes a lot of time and effort as emails need to be sent to each candidates

No performance analysis

8.5 hours to just source 100 candidates

Manually update the recruitment status of each candidate at every stage 

Tiring for recruiters and harms their productivity 

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Automated Sourcing

You don’t need to post the job to each of the job sites. A centralized distribution is automated

All the applications are evaluated

Automated sourcing can help you find candidates with certain skills and experience  at scale

Interacting and engaging takes little time all thanks to automated email nurture campaigns

Data-driven performance analysis delivered by sourcing automation tool

2.5 hours to source 100 candidates, 100 email introductions and 10 initial screenings 

The status gets updated automatically and the pipeline management is automated too

Quick sourcing approach for recruiters and allows them to spend more time evaluating the candidates.

Benefits of using an Automated Sourcing Tool

Source: Entelo, 2019

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Sourcing candidates is evidently the biggest task in terms of time consumption for recruiters. If you think automation is here to replace you and hiring teams – it’s not the case. Sourcing automation tools assist you to streamline your hiring process and help you hire the best talent faster.

Here are the top benefits of an automated sourcing tool:

1. Smooth Hiring Process

Automation helps you streamline the hiring process by continuously managing your candidate pipeline. Additionally, while leveraging automation, all the applications are examined and hence the opportunity is equal and fair for all the candidates. You no more need to intervene manually and update the recruitment status for various candidates. From sourcing, outreach and engagement to onboarding the candidates – everything is seamless.

Especially in this era of virtual recruitment, consistent candidate engagement and an unparalleled hiring experience matter a lot for candidates. 

2. Unbiased Recruitment

One thing humans can’t avoid is bias. Even with a little contribution, recruiters do make biased decisions when sourcing and hiring candidates. With automation, there’s no conscious or subconscious bias based on irrelevant parameters. This ensures a diverse workforce within your organization. 

3. Quality Talent Sourcing

Automation addresses the elephant in the room – quality talent sourcing too! Algorithmic mappings from job descriptions to candidate skillset are fast and efficient, even more than humans. Discovering quality talent is easy and convenient with sourcing automation. 

4. TIme-Saving

Time is probably the most precious resource for recruiters. Especially when sourcing talented passive candidates, who already have recruiters with great offers chasing them – making the hiring process quick becomes even more important. Sourcing automation’s biggest advantage is that it helps save a lot of time by taking care of the repetitive tasks so that you can zero in on interactions and evaluation.

What to look for in Automated Sourcing Tools?

An automated candidate sourcing tool would support you at each stage of your hiring journey. However, the availability of a number of solutions can make you a little confused as to which one should you choose.

Analyze your requirements first and figure out what you expect from your candidate sourcing tool. Here are the features you should look out for in a comprehensive sourcing tool:

• Candidate pipeline and ATS management: You should be able to automate the pipeline management and add candidates in a hassle-free way.‍
• Automated outreach: Once candidates have been added to the pipeline, the tool should allow you to perform outreach at scale. Personalization and multiple channels apart from Email and LinkedIn are always a plus.‍
• Email engagement campaign: From the moment a candidate applies for a job role at your organization or when passive candidates are interested in the position – consistent engagement via email should follow up.
• ‍Find contact details: Before you start reaching out to people in bulk, you will need their contact details. Ideally, you should be able to extract contact details from the target candidate's profile on LinkedIn and Twitter.‍
• Data scraping: Must have for bulk-hiring, data scraping refers to finding a certain category of potential candidates and extracting their data(contact details, current role, skillsets etc.) using filters and boolean search on LinkedIn.
• Intelligent pre-screening: In the case of sourcing actively, AI-driven pre-screening of candidates is vital and immensely effective in candidate sourcing.‍
• Data-driven performance analysis: Analyzing the outcomes of your sourcing campaigns through insights helps you know what’s working and what’s not.

Nurturebox and How it helps in  Automated Sourcing?

We saw why you need a sourcing automation tool, how important it is to choose the right candidate and what should you look for in an automated sourcing tool. 

NurtureBox enables recruitment to scale their talent outreach through automation and powerful plugins. Take a look at how our solution makes hiring hassle-free for you and provides a seamless recruitment experience for your prospective candidates.

1. Find Prospects and add to Campaigns

Identify relevant prospects on LinkedIn and use NurtureBox’s Chrome extension to find their contact details. Our platform allows you to add your prospects to your sourcing campaigns with a single click. So that you can start connecting with prospects straightaway. 

2. Personalized Multi-Channel Outreach

Recruitment of the top talent is just like marketing your offerings to the best prospects. Reaching out to every candidate with the same message won’t help. NurtureBox allows you to create personalized templates and perform outreach at scale without compromising on personalization. As a result, your response rate increases and more prospects are interested in the job opening.

3. ATS Integration and Continuous Pipeline Management

Monitoring and updating your ATS manually is such a task. Imagine updating the status of recruitment for hundreds of candidates on a daily basis, it’s more than hectic. Our automated sourcing solution allows you to simply integrate your existing ATS and each time you add a candidate to the pipeline, and perform consecutive engagement steps – the status is updated without manual intervention. NurtureBox also reminds you to follow up and engage with the rest of the candidates

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4. Email Engagement Sequences

The platform allows you to integrate your sourcing automation with email nurturing campaigns through plugins like Lemlist. The further email engagement is automated as per your configurations. NurtureBox brings everything to one place so that you can take care of your sourcing through a single window.

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5. Track and Analyze What Works

Now comes the best part – data-driven insights are served hot by NurtureBox to help you analyze what works the best for you. The objective is to improve with each iteration and capitalize on the approach that brings the best results.

Conclusion

Sourcing is one of the lengthiest tasks for recruiters and does not allow them to mainly focus on the more productive tasks. Manual sourcing is usually inefficient in today’s competitive recruitment space. Sourcing automation tools solve this by automating most of the repeated tasks and enabling recruiters to scale quality talent sourcing seamlessly. 

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