Wrap A Sourcing Program Around Your Current Recruiting Efforts

How can you ensure maximum efficiency from your sourcing routine, while freeing up many hours per week to recruit? Consider segregating, and then delegating, the specific tasks related to sourcing in your enterprise. It makes sense, from an organizational standpoint, to give sourcing tasks to a person who sources exclusively. In other words, limit sourcing on the part of transaction (or hiring) recruiters to the superficial, and give more in-depth tasks over to a “sourcing specialist.” These “tasks” might include (among other things) POSTING, SEARCHING, and SCREENING incoming email. If done correctly, segregation and delegation will increase the effectiveness and focus of both the recruiting and sourcing functions. In the POSTING realm, a sourcing specialist would identify good sites and author online job ads that would:

sell the company,

sell the position,
describe the position.

This would bring quality, focus, and probably timeliness, to online postings. In the area of SEARCHING, recruiters could be free to perform quick online searches for candidates, while a sourcing specialist would search on the harder-to-fill positions (after establishing which search routines and locations were worthwhile for the profile of candidates being sourced regularly or in special circumstances). This would free up recruiters to recruit, and increase proactive sourcing output. With SCREENING, sourcing specialists would stop resumes on their way to recruiters, and perform the first cut triage by screening for level of interest, and level of qualification with respect to individual jobs and database needs. The sourcing specialist would not interview candidates — this would be up to the recruiters. Screening this way would ensure that the recruiters would see only pertinent candidates, thus freeing up recruiter time. All of this assumes the sourcing specialist has marketing, recruiting, and industry-relevant experience, as well as Internet savvy. The purity of task segregation becomes clouded when trying to decide what to do with the administrative aspects of sourcing. If good communication and sharing of information is established between the sourcing recruiter and an administrative staff person, the admin could assume the manual part of posting (though a sourcing specialist would still “author” the job postings). But if all sourcing routines are efficient and balanced correctly with other functions within the company, a sourcing specialist will have time to post jobs AND search. If you have multiple offices, simply create a cohesive structure in one place and replicate it elsewhere – adjusting it slightly to accommodate local influences. Segregation and delegation will maximize sourcing output while it frees up recruiting time. If you don’t believe me, try it!