Most recruiters waste up to a third of their week sourcing without a structured process only to miss out on great candidates and potential fees. In this competitive candidate market, you need to have an effective approach to candidate sourcing.

How can you engage more with your recruitment tech, data, systems, so you can nail candidate sourcing and improve your pipeline?

3 Ways to Improve Candidate Sourcing for Recruiters

I spoke with Ayla Lyon from Broadbean. They specialise in helping recruiters turbo boost the way they source, attract, and engage candidates and clients. I asked Ayla 3 questions about how recruiters can dramatically improve their candidate sourcing strategy to drive results.

​1. What are your thoughts on the stat, recruiters spend 13 hours a week sourcing candidates?

I’d probably ask what admin they are wasting the rest of their time on if just under two days is being spent on sourcing candidates. While there will be time focussing on client relationships, spending just 13 hours a week sourcing candidates does suggest that recruiters are still spending a lot of time on administrative tasks including CV sifting and job posting.

With recruitment technology and software available to automate most of the mundane, repetitive tasks, recruiters should be able to invest more of their valuable time building meaningful relationships with candidates. With the UK in a recession while competition for talent remains high, freeing up some of this time is going to become more important.

 2. 50% of candidate applications are a poor fit. Why is this the case?

There are a number of elements to this statistic that need to be addressed. In the first instance, the fact that there’s a mismatch between the job applications that are coming through and the job spec suggests the recruitment technology or software that’s being used to promote the roles isn’t working as it should. Jobs need to be written in a way that appeal to the right audience. If the wrong people are applying – particularly at a time when there is still a skills shortage despite the slowdown in hiring – then it’s likely that the job advertisements themselves need a rethink.

It also indicates that any lead generation activity isn’t being optimised for the right keywords or target audiences. Today, recruitment requires an individual, tailored and targeted approach. The ‘spray and pray’ tactic of plastering a job advert everywhere won’t have the desired impact. Success isn’t getting more job applications. Instead, it’s defined by getting fewer, more relevant candidates to apply. With the right recruitment tech these ads can be pushed out in a more targeted manner and if half of the applications recruiters are receiving are a poor fit, then there’s a mis-alignment somewhere in this process.

It is important to add, though, that with skills shortages still rife, there is an increasing need to identify candidates with soft or transferable skills. It’s increasingly becoming apparent that the perfect candidate doesn’t always exist for very specific job specs, meaning that recruiters are having to look for applicants that meet some of the requirements in order to fill job roles. This could be influencing some of the results of the stat of 50%.

3.  How can Broadbean help improve this stat – 73% of recruiters are suffering a candidate shortage?

It’s really not a surprise to see that the majority of recruiters are suffering from a candidate shortage given the pressure we’ve seen on the labour market in the last year. There’s no easy fix to the dearth of talent, but there are ways for recruiters to improve recruitment processes and use recruitment technology to free up a recruitment consultant’s time so they can focus on developing those all-important human relationships.

Broadbean’s technology can save recruiters between one to two hours a day by automating a significant part of the hiring process. The intelligent software is also designed to ensure jobs are being posted in real-time or at optimised times to ensure you’re getting the best results based on user experience candidate data.

Broadbean also provides the analysis and data recruiters need to ensure they are making truly informed decisions around the channels that are delivering the best ROI. As it is agile, it also allows activity to be re-adjusted or shifted in line with the latest real-time data.