Top 5 Features to Look Out for in a Candidate Sourcing Software

Hiring quality talent in today’s competitive space is only getting trickier with time. About 72% of recruiters are struggling to find relevant candidates. Amidst the intense war for top-quality talent, there's hardly any room for experimentation. You just can’t afford to lose your precious time and recruitment efforts to sub-optimal candidate sourcing and hiring processes. The road to redemption? You need to focus on the most critical recruitment tasks and automate the rest. Choosing the right candidate sourcing software is the ideal first step toward streamlining your hiring journey. 

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The global workforce right now consists of 70% of passive candidates and just 30% of active candidates. Sourcing the right people who fit in the boots of your employee persona has clearly become the key to successful hiring. To source better, you need sourcing software that complements your recruitment capabilities. 

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In this blog, we will discuss how vital a candidate sourcing tool is in your recruitment process, and the top five features to look out for in it.

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What is a Candidate Sourcing Tool?

Candidate sourcing software acts as your sourcing companion and helps you with outreach, ATS management, and candidate engagement, and keeps track of your progress through analytics. 

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The aim of utilizing a tool for sourcing candidates is to build, manage and optimize your talent pipeline. With the mundane tasks being taken care of, you can find better talent in less time and primarily focus on evaluating them. 

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As a result, you get ready for the hiring challenges by scaling your candidate sourcing and maximizing your chances of onboarding the best talent.

How Is Candidate Sourcing Software Different from an ATS?

Recruiters and hiring managers often confuse a candidate sourcing tool with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) – but they’re entirely different. ATS is used by everyone in the recruitment team whereas sourcing tools are used by sourcing recruiters.

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An applicant tracking system is used for managing candidates who are already there in the talent pipeline. They have either been contacted by your recruitment team or they have applied to your open roles. An ATS is more of a workflow solution used to manage the hiring process and maintain a candidate database. Recruiters utilize ATS to track various candidates and end-to-end recruitment.

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On the other hand, a candidate sourcing tool is aimed at sourcing candidates and adding them to the talent pipeline. It is to be noted that only reaching out and engaging with these candidates is managed with a sourcing tool. Having a sourcing solution with an integrated ATS will give you the ultimate automation experience. Recruiters usually use sourcing tools to find and engage with passive candidates.

Why do Recruiters Need a Sourcing Tool?

If you have been in recruitment for quite some time, you know finding the best talent is not a cakewalk. However, there’s no way your organization can grow without recruiting great talent.

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76% of the recruiters agree that attracting quality candidates is the biggest challenge for them. The battle for incredible talent has been intense, especially over the last decade. And when it comes to tech hiring - the heat further multiplies.

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Relying on expensive third-party recruiters is no more a sustainable solution. With the global markets facing record-breaking downfalls, startups and SMBs are looking to cut costs in each aspect of the business. The final solution? Organizations are taking it all on themselves.

Further on, recruitment teams have a huge influx of demand which can be extremely challenging to meet. That’s where you need a candidate sourcing tool. 

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At its core, candidate sourcing software enables your talent acquisition team to uncover new talent pools, engage with relevant individuals, fill your talent pipeline and ultimately source the best possible candidates. 

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Let’s dive deep to understand why you need it.

• Productivity
• Cost to hire
• Time to hire
• Quality of hiring
• Streamlined process

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1. To Discover Broader Talent Pools

Let’s be honest – we all have our go-to channels or platforms that we trust the most when it comes to finding talented candidates. And it’s quite justified, using a variety of platforms for outreaching and maintaining the data manually can be overwhelming at times.

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However, you should also consider the probability of countless other recruiters approaching the same talent pool. 

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Scaling your outreach with a candidate sourcing automation tool allows you to find out a variety of fresh talent. Hence, the chances of you hiring good quality talent and adding up to the diversity magnify.

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2. To Keep Your Talent Pipeline Filled

Top talent is available for just 10 days in the market. But what if you are already connected to them? Sourcing passive candidates can be a game-changer even if they aren’t available at the moment.

In cases when you don’t have a talent pipeline, finding suitable candidates for open positions can take much more time and effort. It also increases the chances of you compromising on quality talent because you need to hire soon.

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A candidate sourcing software helps you fill your talent pipelines rapidly and with all the different talent pools so that you don’t need to rush to source candidates manually when required. 

3. For Reducing Time and Cost To Hire

36 days is the average time taken by organizations to hire talent. What do you think might be the reason behind this long hiring cycle? 

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Brownie points for guessing it right - mundane tasks that recruiters like you need to perform on a day-to-day basis. Finding candidates on various platforms, getting their contact details, outreaching, engaging across various communication platforms and maintaining and updating a database continuously take up a lot of time.

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When supported by a candidate sourcing software, a majority of the repeated tasks are taken care of and hence the time to source and hire candidates considerably decreases. 

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With the same recruitment team sourcing and hiring more talent periodically (without compromising on the quality), the cost to hire is reduced. 

4. For Simplified Talent Management

When hiring for multiple roles, sourcing talent from numerous channels and constantly shortlisting candidates – managing your talent pipeline can be too clumsy. Chances are high that you might even miss out on connecting with talented individuals as the data gets lost in your crowded ATS.

When using candidate sourcing software, you get a birds-eye view of your talent pipeline. More importantly, automation helps you stay organized and not miss out on engaging with any of the candidates. So that you stay organized with your recruitment campaigns, automate the top-of-the-funnel tasks and accelerate your sourcing process.

Top 5 Must-Have Features in Candidate Sourcing Software

Here is the list of key features you should look out for in a candidate sourcing tool:

#1 Sync With Your ATS

You cannot spend hours transferring data from one platform to another. And not maintaining all the candidates’ details at a single place can lead to mismanagement, so your sourcing management software should be able to sync with your ATS (applicant tracking system) in order to keep your talent pipeline organized and accessible.

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NurtureBox allows you to automatically sync candidate profiles to your existing ATS so that you have a live overview of your talent pipeline and the recruitment status of candidates.

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Our platform also makes sure your pipeline does not contain duplicate entries. So that you never reach out to a prospect twice.

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#2 Add Prospects From Various Platforms To Your Campaigns

An ideal candidate sourcing solution should facilitate adding prospects to your sourcing campaigns. Hiring managers should find it easy to source top talent and fill their talent pipeline. Automated or semi-automated sourcing allows you to add candidates from any platform to your specific role pipelines with a single click. This will allow you to source a large number of candidates from various talent pools, more than you could do manually. 

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For adding them to your campaigns, you should be able to import candidate details like their personal email id and phone number. NurtureBox’s Chrome extension allows you to source prospects from LinkedIn and adds them to your campaigns within seconds. You can also install various plugins like Recruitee, Rocketreach and SIgnalhire to find your target prospect’s contact information.

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#3 Automated Outreach and Engagement Across Multiple Channels

The key to scaling your recruitment campaigns lies in automated outreach. It’s a candidate-driven era and you should be able to reach out to target prospects on their preferred channels of communication. A comprehensive candidate sourcing tool allows you to perform automated outreach campaigns through multiple platforms: LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Email and more.

Just automated outreach isn’t enough. As with marketing, you need to engage continuously with your prospects. Doing that with hundreds of candidates manually can be hefty. Your sourcing tool must offer the functionality of doing that in a jiffy.

NurtureBox helps you scale your outreach and engagement with a multichannel approach. SO that you can execute your candidate engagement campaigns via channels like Whatsapp, Email and LinkedIn based on what the candidate prefers. 

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#4 Personalized Communication

Scaling your outreach doesn’t mean sending the same messages to everyone in your prospects list. Personalization is a vital factor that you need to take care of while outreach and candidate engagement.

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The communication happening through your candidate sourcing tool needs to be personalized as per the target candidate’s age, current role, demographics and preferences. 

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Through personalization, you win your candidates’ trust and multiply your chances of hiring the top talent.

NurtureBox offers personalized outreach and candidate engagement that feel human.

#5 Progress Tracking and Analytics

Sourcing campaigns need to be optimized based on data. It’s vital because you need to know what works and how the prospects are reacting to your outreach and engagement.

A candidate sourcing software should have the functionality to track metrics like subject lines, templates, candidates showing interest, time of sending the messages, response rate and more.

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NurtureBox allows you to track engagement metrics and analyze what’s working the best for your sourcing campaigns. Every touchpoint in your candidate pipeline execution is used to give you deep data-backed insights.

Conclusion 

A candidate sourcing software can play a pivotal role in your recruitment cycle. Building, managing and continuously optimizing a talent pipeline will be vital to your hiring goals. The competition for top talent is undoubtedly huge, but it is possible to attract the best talent if outreach and personalized engagement are done at scale. 

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NurtureBox is a comprehensive solution that takes care of your candidate outreach at scale so that you can focus on the more crucial part - evaluating and interviewing them.

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