Employers who want to improve their talent acquisition should take note of these statistics from two recent Aberdeen Group reports:
These figures show you need to focus on quality sourcing and building a strong talent pipeline. In fact, doing so is the first of our “4 Key Steps to Successful Talent Acquisition.” Let’s take a closer look.
Sourcing
Quality sourcing may not win the war for talent for your company but poor sourcing sure can lose it. In the talent acquisition process, if you source the wrong candidates, your efforts are doomed from the start. If you don’t source enough of the right candidates, you’ll struggle to consistently fill your talent needs.
Two important elements of quality sourcing are:
- Tracking and measuring your talent sources
- Effective recruitment marketing
Tracking and measuring the performance of your talent sources (internal referrals, external recruiting partners, social sites, job boards, corporate career sites) is critical because it’s the only way to optimally focus and adjust your sourcing efforts and budget.
As for effective recruitment marketing, communicating intriguing messages about your organization and your culture to candidates and potential candidates helps attract more candidates while also making candidates
eager to join your organization. In fact, employers worldwide are recognizing the importance of recruitment marketing. According to LinkedIn’s
Global Recruiting Trends 2016 report, 59% of respondents are “investing more in their employer brand compared to last year.”
Talent Pipeline
Another essential part of finding and hiring the
right people (those with the specific skills, qualities and capabilities your organization needs) is knowing exactly who’s in your talent pipeline. This includes both internal talent and external candidates.
Internal talent—Your organization may have a surplus of some skills, qualities and capabilities, and a shortage of others. By understanding your internal talent pipeline, you’ll know which positions you have the bench strength to fill internally, and you’ll identify skills shortages that you need to fortify before they become major problems.
External Candidates—By maintaining a strong candidate pipeline, you’ll always have a pool of qualified talent that you can use to fill positions when they open, reducing time to hire and increasing your quality of hire.
Modern Talent Acquisition Software Can Help!
Modern talent acquisition software is a great tool for improving your sourcing and talent pipeline.
Sourcing: It enables you to efficiently and effectively track and measure your talent sources. You can see the quantity and types of candidates you’re receiving, the talent sources they came from and identify trends. You can also evaluate the effectiveness of individual job postings—as software can show you the candidates being attracted and how far those candidates made it through the hiring process.
Talent pipeline: Modern talent acquisition software empowers you to track your current employees’ skills and abilities, helping you identify both quality internal candidates and skills needs in your organization.
The result is you can access and evaluate data that will help you make more informed decisions and identify high-quality candidates.
For more sourcing and talent pipeline tips, and to learn other important steps for improving your hiring, read our new article “4 Key Steps to Successful Talent Acquisition.” 
