As your business grows, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is finding and hiring the right talent. It’s often the hardest – but most important – part of any business’ growth trajectory.
In order to grow your business, it’s so important to have the right team onboard to help you achieve milestone after milestone. That’s why creating a sourcing plan is a crucial step in the journey to becoming great at hiring.
Here are six steps we recommend you follow to build your sourcing plan:
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1) Identify your hiring needs 🧩
As we talked through in Blogs 1, 2 and 3 of this Hiring Plan 101 series, you should start by assessing your company’s current and future hiring needs. Determine the roles and positions you need to fill, the impact you expect them to have, and the number of hires you need to make. This will help you prioritise your hiring efforts and allocate resources more effectively and get those critical hires made as quickly as possible.
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2) Save room for storytelling 📖
Your employer brand is your company’s reputation as an employer. In the post-covid, remote-working world, it’s so important to be able to tell your company’s story in a way that simultaneously distinguishes you from your competition and engages the right talent. Define your values, mission, and proposition, then ensure you have a plan to showcase them in your job postings, website, and social media channel as part of your sourcing plan.
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3) Select the right sourcing channels 🔍
It’s not as simple as utilising as many sourcing channels as possible to attract the talent you need. Whilst a mix of channels such as job boards, social media and referrals will reach a wider pool of candidates, that’s no good if you’re after hard-to-find talent (and who isn’t, by the way!). Look closely at the role profiles you’re searching for, the story you need to tell them and where they can be found. Identify the channels that work best for finding that talent and allocate your resources accordingly. It’ll serve you better to double down on one great sourcing channel rather than to try your luck at 5 or 6 that don’t contribute any suitable candidates.
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4) Leverage technology 🧠
Make sure technology forms part of your sourcing plan. Use it to streamline your hiring process and make it more efficient; ultimately saving you valuable time and money as you hire. Use an all-in-one applicant tracking system (ATS) like Teamtailor to manage your candidate pipeline, track key metrics and even distribute your employer branding content.
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5) Build your talent pipeline 🚀
Don’t wait until the house has burnt down to call the fire brigade. Equally, don’t wait until a critical position has become, well… even more critical, to start looking for candidates. Built your pipeline of talent by continuously sourcing and giving candidates a place to talent pool themselves and remain engaged with your journey. Look out for an ATS with a talent pooling feature that allows you to create a pool of pre-qualified candidates when a critical hire is coming down the pipe.
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6) Measure and manage 📊
Utilising an ATS will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your sourcing plan infinitely faster and more detailed than any manual effort. By measuring performance against key metrics such as time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, retention and ROI per sourcing channel, you’ll be able to spot gaps in your sourcing plan and constantly tighten up your hiring processes over time.
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Summary 👇
Building a sourcing plan commands up-front time and effort, but is an essential step for ensuring you’re able to create, execute and measure hiring activity effectively. The growth of any great start-up or scale-up is underpinned by the strength of the team brought in along the way. The early hires, in what we call the ‘formative years’, are so important to set a foundation upon which great teams are built and great products are shipped.
The six steps above outline where you can concentrate your efforts in order to build a sourcing plan that helps you become an efficient hiring machine. Beyond that, you can always speak to one of our talent experts for a more detailed conversation about where to start.
