The Secret to Attracting Top Talent

The Talent Problem

Numbers do not lie. Over the next decade, nearly 3.5 million manufacturing jobs will be posted. Two million of these jobs are expected to go unfilled due to a skills gap according to the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte Consulting. Similar scary numbers can be found across many other industries as well. No matter where you sit in your organization, the pains of finding quality talent can be felt. Whether it is from the growing economy with a 3.9% unemployment rate or the lack of skilled workers, the talent struggle is real. Are you prepared to meet the human resource demands for your company? There is a solution.

The Secret Solution

Focus on Sourcing. A key component that will have an immediate impact to your recruiting efforts is the role of sourcing. While sourcing is not a new concept in the recruiting cycle, it’s the best kept secret to supporting your traditional process. Author Gary Keller lays it out well, “You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.” A recruiter’s day revolves around intake meetings, screening applicants, and scheduling interviews on top of other required duties. Typically, their day is inundated with tasks beyond the actual recruiting function leaving little time to do a deep dive for quality candidate prospects. Instead, imagine the possibilities of a recruiter tapping into a pipeline of qualified prospective candidates found by a motivated Sourcer.

Recruiting and sourcing should be defined as separate roles because they require different skills, processes, and desired outcomes. Sourcing is much more than simply finding a resume and candidate contact information. If an organization does not separate the two, it can significantly increase the overall cost and time to hire a qualified candidate.

Benefits to Effective Sourcing

From my experience, an effective Sourcer helps the recruiting team achieve their talent objectives. Geoff Webb, a 17-year recruiter turned Sourcer defines the role well in his article, Recruiting vs. Sourcing (A Day in the Life). Webb states,

“A Sourcer finds the passive candidates, the ones not applying through the corporate website or posting on the job boards. A Sourcer is a hunter. A Sourcer creates interest and drives talent to the organization. This means doing research: poring over org charts, job descriptions, and social media profiles, and hitting search engines and competitor web pages. This means engaging potential candidates: messaging through social media, sending emails, picking up the phone. And because a hunt often involves a chase, this means repeating, tweaking, and refining these activities — until you have a slate of qualified prospects.”

In 2015, I was lucky enough to join the DISHER team as a Sourcer and help build our new recruiting process. Although I already had both agency and corporate recruiting experience, it was during a time when the hiring market was completely different. At DISHER, I learned quickly that the role of sourcing is the most strategic part of the recruiting process. And knowing how to effectively source talent is more important today than ever before. While finding people has become much easier with technology, finding the right people has become increasingly harder. Today the recruiting landscape is fundamentally different, yet everyone still wants to find that perfect candidate or what we in the sourcing world call the “purple squirrel”.

Sourcing Tools

It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel when revamping your recruiting process. However, the recruiting process does need to be individualized to an organization’s uniquely defined needs. At DISHER, we started our transformation with the basics. We hired individuals to specialize in sourcing functions, such as Boolean strings and X-ray searches. We provided the tools they needed to become social media experts and chrome extension junkies. When I started, these tools had very little meaning to me. But I focused on aligning our practices with others in the sourcing community and learned from the best.

To summarize, here are a few key points to remember. An engaged talent Sourcer will save you time and money. Sourcing requires a special mindset; a Sourcer needs to be a hunter that is determined and loves to dig in the weeds. They should be able to produce quantity but have a higher value on quality. Every Sourcer is different and will develop their own method to their madness as I, along with many other industry pros, exemplify in The Sourcers’ Secret Playbook. Most importantly, sourcing and recruiting roles carry equal value and are complementary to each other in helping organizations attract top talent in a competitive environment.

If your organization needs some help with sourcing, recruiting, or retaining top talent, contact DISHER. We would love to come alongside in your efforts to build a culture of high performance.

Written By: Stephanie Hamelmann | Talent Engineer
Stephanie is passionate about staffing. “I’ve never seen recruiting as a job but as a way to make a difference in someone’s life.” In her spare time, Stephanie enjoys playing baseball with her two active boys and water skiing. Stephanie’s hero is her Great Grandmother who showed her what it’s like to live a life full of love, laughter, and happiness. Stephanie graduated from Purdue University with a BA in Communications.