How Sourcing Automation Tools can Improve Your Hiring Efficiency?

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Keeping your talent pipeline filled with quality candidates isn’t enough anymore. The last decade has been testing for recruiters – talent shortage, competitive heat and growing demands being the most constant roadblocks. Even continuous pivot in strategies and exceptional efforts couldn’t deliver efficient hiring in numerous cases. Apart from all the external challenges, you are consistently racing against time when it comes to sourcing, engaging and evaluating prospects. 

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There’s only one path towards recruiting better - act smart and act fast! The need of the hour is to optimize the most human-centric tasks (interacting) and get rid of the iterative tasks. Candidate sourcing automation enables your team to hire smartly and efficiently by primarily focusing on understanding and qualifying the talent.

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Contrary to popular belief, AI (or automation) is not used to hire candidates on our behalf. Intelligent sourcing automation tools infact help us to hire better and streamline the recruitment process. The most beneficial outcomes of automation in hiring include saving time (67%), removal of human bias (43%), matching with the best candidate (31%) and saving money (30%).

It should be kept in mind that the core strength of a recruitment team lies in their ability to engage and interact with talent effectively. No doubt the tough competition has forced a few changes to the recruitment practices, but even then the objectives remain the same.

Candidate sourcing automation can be trusted to streamline the top-of-the-funnel tasks including – sourcing, outreach, engagement and ATS management. Hence, you would be able to manage your talent pipeline without any hassle and whenever a requirement arises, you know where to go for the best options.

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Let’s now dive deep to discuss in detail sourcing automation and how such tools make hiring better, faster and easier. 

What is Candidate Sourcing Automation?

Automated candidate sourcing is aimed at scaling the discovery, outreach and engagement of talent. With continuously rising demand for top talent, candidate sourcing automation is clearly becoming a ‘need’ rather than a ‘nice-to-have’ for recruiters. Saving time, reaching diverse talent pools, boosting engagement efficiency, and analyzing sourcing insights are just a few top-level benefits of automated sourcing, the process allows recruiters to optimize the hiring journey in numerous ways.

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A survey by Deloitte found that finding qualified candidates is the biggest challenge for 61% of the recruiters. And around 80% of executives believe AI and automation will boost recruitment productivity while considerably improving performance.

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Tasks like finding contact details, adding each candidate to your ATS manually, multi-channel outreach, and engaging and nurturing consume a majority of your time. With candidate sourcing automation, all of these along with pre-screening of candidates can be taken care of by the sourcing automation tool. 

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The recruitment industry has transformed and the dominance of enterprises is hardly relevant now. To hire top talent, you need to follow a candidate-centric approach. Although employer brand does play a significant role in attracting the best candidates, whether or not you will successfully hire them depends on the interaction, engagement and the overall recruitment experience. So as a recruiter, you need to maximize your focus on the quality of hiring and recruitment experience.

Why is it important to Automate Candidate Sourcing?

What comes to your mind when you hear candidate sourcing? Reaching out to a number of passive candidates and connecting with them to know if they’re interested and fit well into your organization – all of this to hire the most talented people and save capital and time. Candidate sourcing automation helps scale this approach so that your recruitment team can drive growth and help in scaling your organization. 

Here are three reasons why automated candidate sourcing is important for enhancing  your hiring efficiency:

#1 To Build a Great Talent Pipeline

Hiring requirements are almost never known well in advance to any of the recruiters. Unrealistic deadlines are common in SMBs and you need to cope with the rapidly growing demand. The ideal road to redemption? Keep your talent pipeline filled with top-quality talent. 

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Regular sourcing of candidates, especially for the verticals with frequent demand for hiring, is vital. On average, recruiters spend around 30 hours every week sourcing candidates. Undoubtedly, manual sourcing takes a majority of your time. And candidate sourcing automation enables you to build a talent pipeline through minimal efforts and in less time.

#2 To Enhance Productivity

Sourcing automation is directly linked to your productivity as a recruiter. With help of AI and automation, you can get so much done within a limited time and work continuously on optimization of your processes as well. Additionally, leveraging technology in sourcing candidates removes the potential bias that humans usually tend to have.

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Productivity is driven by your management and candidate sourcing automation drives your hiring journey. How? By taking care of continuous database updating and candidate engagement. As a result, you reach out to more people, book more interviews and hire far better talent than when you source a few candidates manually. Optimization of workflows and automating the repeatable tasks allows recruiters to boost their productivity and connect with top-quality candidates.

#3 To Reduce Time and Cost to Hire

Making your recruitment journey faster can be pivotal for your organization and its growth. On average, a tech talent takes 49 days to hire and it’s clearly way more time than what executives expect from recruiters. And more time simply means the high cost of hiring, but we already know where the majority of the time goes when you need to manually manage each step of the sourcing to hiring cycle.

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Another point to be noted is a bad hire cost a company 30% of the employee’s yearly pay – which again brings us back to sourcing better through automation. It’s crucial that we don’t leave any stones unturned when it comes to sourcing the best possible candidates, to save precious resources and grow seamlessly.

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Top Automated Candidate Sourcing Techniques 

Recruiters today have a range of choices when it comes to candidate sourcing techniques and strategies. From AI to automated candidate database sourcing solutions, the possibilities are endless. Here are a few of the best strategies for candidate sourcing automation:

1. AI for pre-screening candidates

An intelligent sourcing automation technique is based upon an AI algorithm that helps you decide if a candidate is fit for your open position or not.

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Primarily for sourcing active candidates, AI for pre-screening makes sure that all the applications are being considered equally. It’s a great approach to ensure all of the CVs and resumes are being checked unlike recruiters when done manually. 

2. Sourcing and Hiring Chatbots 

Another technique powered by AI, chatbots can be a real game-changer as they enable real-time conversations. Effective candidate engagement is the key to converting your candidate talent pool to your employees.

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A chatbot gives the convenience of an instant valuable solution to any problem asked over it. It is evident that candidate experience matters immensely too.

3. The Recruitment Funnel

You have heard about funnels before, but it was about sales, right? Recruitment funnel automation functions in a way somewhat similar to what sales funnels do but here you’re selling to talented candidates instead of your target buyers. 

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A recruitment funnel technique of sourcing candidates involves targeting the top experienced talent through ads, personalized email campaigns and website landing pages – all automated. 

4. Automated Outreach and Engagement

Intended for sourcing passive candidates, automated outreach and engagement techniques are getting immensely popular. This automation approach allows to scale candidate sourcing and explore diverse talent pools through multi-channel outreach. 

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An automated candidate sourcing tool following this technique allows you to add prospects to your campaigns, automate outreach through multiple channels and engage with them continuously. The best part – you don’t need to maintain the candidate database and update it manually but you still get valuable insights to optimize your sourcing performance.

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Why Candidate Sourcing Should not be Done Manually?

If you have been in the recruitment space for more than a year, you probably know how frustrating things get when you don’t have tangible results (successful hires) even after weeks of brainstorming, planning and executing.

Why does it happen? Because you cannot focus on the most critical parts of the recruitment journey including interacting with candidates and evaluating them. Here are the top reasons why you should not source candidates manually:

• You cannot hire at scale when sourcing manually
• Unlocking diverse talent pools is blurry 
• You end up investing a lot of time for a rather small candidate pipeline
• It does not allow you to focus on more important tasks
• Gets immensely hectic at times due to a variety of tasks and maintenance
• Prone to errors and inefficient engagement

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How NurtureBox Solves Candidate Sourcing?

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NurtureBox enables recruitment teams to automate and scale multi-channel outreach to identify, evaluate and hire top talent for their organization. From finding candidates to adding them to your campaigns with a single click and analyzing your performance insights, the comprehensive platform allows you to execute personalized sourcing campaigns. 

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As we are headed towards a candidate-centred recruitment culture, NurtureBox helps you interact and engage with your target prospects on their preferred channels. More importantly, our Chrome extension allows you to connect your existing ATS within a few seconds and offers numerous plugins for a fully automated candidate sourcing and engagement experience. 

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