Active Sourcing: 5 pro tips for your active recruiting plus one absolute secret hack

Reading time approx. 7 minutes

Breadcrumb: mana HR → HR Knowledge → Blog → Active Sourcing Pro Tips

Contents

• Post and Pray? No: Active Sourcing!
• Active Sourcing: Definition
• Our 5 + 1 pro tips for your active sourcing
• Want more content like this?
• Conclusion: Active outreach + individual communication + the courage to try new things = successful active sourcing
• Frequently Asked Questions

TL;DR

Active sourcing means actively tracking down the right skilled candidates with Boolean search operators and approaching them in a personal, audience-specific and well-timed way, instead of waiting for applications to arrive. That noticeably raises your reply rate in recruiting. The exclusive secret hack: short video messages filmed on your smartphone set you apart from the crowd and can lift your reply rate by up to 50 %.

!Illustration for active sourcing in recruiting: reaching out to skilled candidates in an active, personal way instead of waiting for applications to arrive.

Author: Dominik Becker · Published: June 29, 2022

Share on LinkedIn · Share on XING · Share on Facebook

Picture this: it is the war for talent and you are right in the middle of it. The candidate market is swept clean, good employees and skilled workers are hard to come by, and the pandemic did not make the situation any easier. Sadly, this scenario is no fantasy. It is the harsh reality of recruiting.

In shortage occupations especially, roles often stay open for more than 160 days. That is almost 23 weeks, or more than five months. So nearly half a year. And every day costs you money, development potential and very likely even more employees, because your current staff has to absorb the extra workload and, at some point, drops out from exhaustion.

So what can you do to break the wave of the skills shortage for your company?

The answer here is active sourcing. What exactly that means, and the tricks that keep you one step ahead of the competition in recruiting, is what we share with you in this article.

Post and Pray? No: Active Sourcing!

Classic recruiting is unfortunately still far too often built on the "post and pray" motto: place ads on the same worn-out paths, maybe visit a few career fairs, then lean back in the office chair and wait for applications to come in. But for a while now, that method probably has not been doing much for your inbox. Aside from the impatient follow-up questions from the departments asking where the new hires are.

So you need to rethink: no more silent prayers. Come out of waiting mode, get moving and bring some momentum into your recruiting. Active sourcing is what this promising approach in talent acquisition is called, and it essentially turns you into a headhunter. Sounds exciting? It is, because active candidate search encourages and demands your creativity and your sensitivity in dealing with people.

Active Sourcing: Definition

Active sourcing, sometimes also called active recruiting, is all about actively tracking down and approaching potential candidates for your open roles.

You start with two steps here:

1. You search for qualified candidates in a targeted way.
2. You approach them in an audience-specific and personal way.

So far, so good. But what follows is the true test of skill: you have to convince potential applicants of the open role and of your company. Skilled workers and talent have a wide choice on the job market today, and you have to stand out from it. Exactly how, we will reveal in a moment.

But first, one small extra tip:

Even if steps one and two do not close your staffing gaps right away, you should stay in touch with the top talent. That way you build up a talent pipeline that you can hopefully use to fill your open roles over the long term.

So leaning back and praying is a thing of the past. Today it is about actively searching and reaching people.

Our 5 + 1 pro tips for your active sourcing

And so you can finally get started successfully with active sourcing, here are our top tips:

#1 Boolean search operators

Active candidate search is easy to say. The web is vast, the platforms are many, and you may well be asking yourself: what am I even supposed to type in there? Boolean search operators are your little helpers for every search field. With them you turn your search criteria neatly into results. Even though there are ten different operators for Boolean search in total, it is enough at first to be familiar with the three most common ones:

• AND connects different search terms. Looking for an accountant who speaks English? Try the input "Accountant AND English".
• OR is what you use when you are not sure what to type, because several terms fit. For example, when you are looking for a software developer who might also describe themselves as a developer or engineer in their profile. Your search then looks like this: "Developer OR Engineer OR Coder".
• NOT is useful when there are criteria you definitely want to exclude. So if you do not want to find candidates from certain companies (or from your own company) in the results, you type "NOT _company name_".

#2 Focus on the candidate

If you want to approach candidates personally, the best place to start is your job descriptions. Move away from phrasings like "Your tasks are..." or "This is what you need to bring..." and turn toward the person you want to reach. Put your potential new team members at the center. "This is what your working day with us could look like..." and "This is how you could bring your skills into the team..." sounds far more personal. Almost as if you could start together tomorrow.

#3 Speak to your audience

Job postings are often created with copy and paste. The company profile that has sat there unchanged for five years? Will do just fine now too. The job description? Hold on, we had something similar recently. The requirements profile? Sounds like a jack of all trades, but someone will turn up. Sound familiar? Then it is little wonder if there is nothing but silence in your recruiters' inbox.

When you create job postings, always keep in mind who you want to reach and shape your text around that. Looking for support in controlling? Then win people over with numbers, facts and forecasts. Do you need IT people? Present your current tech stack instead.

That does not just sound like work, at first it is work. But your dusty inbox will thank you for it.

#4 Concrete next steps

Be committed. More than half of all applicants have had bad experiences during the recruiting process, at various points along the candidate journey. The result: dropped applications. To succeed in active recruiting, a positive candidate experience is therefore hugely important. You give your talent a good feeling when you reflect back to them at every stage of their journey where they currently stand and how things will continue.

Try sending 2 to 3 suggested times for a first meeting right along with your message. That shows on one hand how serious you are, and on the other it speeds up the recruiting process. And do you know that awkward situation when you are not sure whether to reply to an email or not? If you end every written exchange with a question to the candidate, you avoid that uncomfortable (message) silence and encourage the conversation to keep going. That builds connection and increases commitment.

Does that sound doable to you?

#5 Timing of your message

If you believe various statistical analyses (and, admittedly, perhaps your own experience too), the first email check of the day happens in bed.

But away from the studies and into your everyday life: when do you usually check your personal emails? Over breakfast, or maybe in the morning on the train to work, or after work stuck in the commuter traffic? Exactly. And just like you, 42 % of employees,16%25%20check%20them%20when%20commuting) do the same. Anything that arrives in between you notice at best with one eye, push to later, and by evening have already forgotten again, while newsletters and spam pile on top. The same thing happens to your messages and job offers, of course, if you send them at the wrong time.

We therefore recommend timing your candidate outreach well. Ideally you send your candidate messages before 8:00 or from 16:30 onward, so you pop up right at the top of the inbox.

#6 The exclusive secret tip: how to raise your reply rate by 50 %

With our absolute active sourcing hack, you lift your contact with candidates onto a very special (relationship) level: keep the text in your message short and instead wow your candidate with a little video. All you need is your smartphone and off you go. Film yourself introducing the job details, the future team and your company culture in person. Perfection is not important here, because what wins is authenticity and personality. On top of that, you will be pretty much the only recruiter using this method, which makes you stand out completely from the crowd of job offers. Another positive effect is that the people you contact get the feeling they already know you. That way you build a relationship early on, one that ties candidates to you and your company.

Give it a try and watch your reply rate climb as a result.

Want more content like this?

Sign up for the newsletter

Conclusion: Active outreach + individual communication + the courage to try new things = successful active sourcing

To come out on top in the war for talent, you need a new approach. With active sourcing you step out of passivity and win candidates over with active outreach and individual communication. Along the way you can boldly test new paths to raise your reply rate and fill your candidate pipeline.

Maybe a little sentimental, but fitting: a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. "Do not walk only the smooth roads. Walk the paths no one has walked, so that you leave traces and not just dust."

In that spirit: good luck.