If you feel your time-to-hire and/or quality of candidates are not up to par, you should take a look at where you’re sourcing your candidates. This includes everywhere you post your jobs: online job boards, career pages, social networks, job fairs, traditional media like newspapers or magazines, and via referrals. This will allow you to determine where to find the best job candidates.
Make note of everywhere you are currently receiving candidates from. Then, measure each of the following metrics from each source over a given timeframe (such as a year):
- Amount of total applicants
- Amount of total eligible candidates
- Amount of candidates who received offers
Once you’ve gained this information, you’ll have a better idea of which sourcing platforms to invest more time or money into and which you can probably skip going forward. Incorporating your jobs’ conversion rates here can help you determine where to focus your efforts in the future.
Remember that a particular channel might have yielded fewer total applicants, but produced more eligible or hired candidates. This indicates that the sourcing channel might benefit from rewritten job posts or advertising spend.
It’s also important to realize that one size does not fit all. Take a look at the same data by job category to identify which recruitment channels are best to invest in for a particular department, skillset, or type of position. You might get amazing marketing candidates from one job board, but hardly any engineering ones. That probably means they are looking for opportunities elsewhere.
Candidate sourcing can also play a crucial role in helping improve your diversity hiring initiatives. Determining where diverse candidates are more likely to see and apply to your jobs can help you put more resources into areas of recruitment that will yield diverse applicants.
A good applicant tracking system can make it easier to determine where you get the best job candidates from and save you time by eliminating the guesswork when it comes to where to post your open requisitions and any additional work that should go into promoting those postings.
