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Great Active Candidate Sourcing Ideas

By Lou Adler, February 20, 2008

There are some top-notch, fully-employed people who sometimes voluntarily seek out new career opportunities. Since they’re fully-employed and top-notch they don’t expend too much effort in looking for something else. When they get itchy or at the first hint of trouble they’ll first start networking with friends and former associates. Then they’ll contact a recruiter or two. Then they’ll probably Google for jobs (e.g., searching on the job title and a location) and check out some specialty or niche job boards. If nothing develops from these sources, they’ll probably look at the career websites of some highly regarded companies. As a last resort, they’ll check out the major boards.

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If your active sourcing processes don’t mimic how good people investigate new career opportunities online, you won’t find very many. To increase your share of this group of top performers who are somewhat active and highly selective you’ll need to reach out to them, not wait for them to come to you, or at least post your jobs where they’re likely to look. Here are some active sourcing program ideas that can help you pull this off:

1. Stop using traditional job descriptions as ad copy; instead tell compelling stories. Boring ads filled with qualifications and experience requirements will not attract a top performer. Use your ads to tell stories by describing some of the big projects and the importance of the job. “Use your business software product marketing background to help launch our new business analytics line” is far more compelling than “Must have 6-8 years in the business-to-business database industry.” Minimize the qualifications and put them at the bottom of the listing. Make sure you start off with a compelling title to capture attention. Even “Software Marketing Magician” will get more response than “Product Marketing Manager – Software.” (More articles on this topic.)
2. Reverse engineer your ads to make sure they’re found. Technology is underutilized in the recruiting space, but can be a critical differentiator. To get started, try to find your job posting using Google (search on the title and city), on the job boards you’re now using, and on your own career site. If your ad is difficult to find, you won’t get many candidates to apply. Reverse engineering is the process of figuring out which sites and ads the candidates you want to reach will likely find when searching for jobs. This is where you need to post your jobs. Then you have to figure out how to get your jobs to the top of the listings. Start by figuring out how the ads that did get to the top got there and then copy what they did. You’ll find some clues by looking at the source code and the meta tags. Here is some more information on this or send us an email if you’d like some help here.
3. Use pay-per-click to get your ads seen on the first page. Once you’ve selected the best boards to post your ads on through reverse engineering, you’ll want to make sure candidates that use Google will find them on the first page or two. Aggregators (see below) and pay-per-click are the simplest and quickest ways to get your ads seen. Pay-per-click (sponsored ads on the right side of the standard rankings) can be cost effective if you use less common terms, but something a job seeker might include when searching for a comparable job. For example, the terms “jobs” might be expensive, but “ASIC” might not be. To find passive candidates, you can purchase terms that someone in a comparable job might use when looking for specific information related to their work. A civil engineer might be looking for information on the stress caused by earthquakes on steel cross members. A creative job posting nearby just might catch the person’s eye. To pull this off purchase related civil engineering terms.
4. Use aggregators. Go to simplyhired.com and indeed.com and see if you can find your jobs using their search process. If not, make sure you follow their procedures for getting your jobs found. These two sites are job aggregators. They collect jobs from job boards, niche sites, and career sites, and allow job seekers to search them from a central point. They also make them available for those that use Google to search for jobs. Check out their pay-per-click model to get to the top of the listings. The cost for visibility can be quite small, especially if you select your keywords properly. Combined, their traffic is increasing and is now just a little less than Monster’s, which has shown a significant drop-off in traffic over the past few years.
5. Use search engine optimization (SEO) to position your ad on the top of the organic rankings. Look at one of your job postings, whether it’s on your career site or a job board. Now look at the URL (the http://www stuff). If your job title isn’t clear, no one will be able to find your ad using Google or any search engine. Now look at the source code for the page (on IE you can get to this by clicking View in the top menu and then Source in the pull down menu). Now look at the keywords and description terms (these are meta tags). If the job title, company, city, and keywords aren’t listed, no one using Google will be able to find this posting using normal search techniques. You can either update all of these yourself or contact Jobs2web.com and they’ll do it for you. Applicant tracking systems were not designed to ensure your ads could be found by search engines. SEO techniques need to be used to compensate for this underlying design flaw.
6. Use LinkedIn to find semi-active candidates and manage your network. I recently wrote an article about the importance of using LinkedIn for active and passive candidate sourcing. Rather than repeat it, go to LinkedIn.com and link in to me using lou@adlerconcepts.com. You’ll instantly have a network of 300 thousand people. Now read this article to learn how to double your productivity (placements/month) by using and expanding this network.
7. Use ZoomInfo’s JobCast to send compelling emails. We use ZoomInfo on every mid-management and executive search we conduct through our retained search group. Since there are close to 40 million names in ZoomInfo, it’s simple to develop a strong list of passive candidates within hours. Better: more than 50% of these names have current email information. Using JobCast, we convert our compelling ad into a very personal email and send it out within 30 minutes after getting our first target list. If the email is compelling you’ll get some semi-active candidates to respond immediately, and a few referrals within a day or two. We just completed three senior-management searches and found finalists in days using this process.
8. Use recruiter networks, like BountyJobs.com, to find strong candidates who have just entered the market. Good, deeply-networked recruiters always have a few extra strong candidates ready to move at the right opportunity. These are the recruiters top people call when they just start to look. This is a great pool of candidates and BountyJobs.com has taken advantage of this network by allowing companies to post their jobs and make them visible to this select group of recruiters. Recruiters with strong candidates are permitted to present them for review and to get on the “select” list. A number of my clients have successfully used BountyJobs to find some great people very quickly.
9. Join and use social networks. I have Facebook and MySpace accounts, and use these and similar tools to find active and passive candidates. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, and they’re a bit cumbersome for recruiting purposes. Regardless, you should try them for difficult searches after you’ve exhausted the list here.
10. Google for resumes. In our recruiter training we devote about an hour demonstrating how to use Google to find resumes online. This is all you need to quickly find hundreds of potential candidates. While the searching techniques are simple to learn, you still need to contact these people and recruit them. Start by sending compelling emails to source the semi-active candidates in this list. You’ll need to directly call the rest, and while most are passive candidates, you’ll have good success if you use the cold-calling and networking techniques covered in our recruiter training programs. Here are some articles on networking to help you get started.
11. Use CRM software and a proprietary resume database. Make sure you keep all of your resumes in a common accessible database. Nurture these by sending regular emails using some type of candidate relationship management (CRM) software. Then when you have an open position, send a compelling email asking people to respond or refer others. If you do a good job building a proprietary resume of strong people – including those candidates who didn’t get hired, but came close – and keep it warm, you’ll be able to fill 20-30% of your open assignments this way. (Here are some CRM articles worth reading.)
12. Use talent hubs to combine comparable jobs. When searching for jobs most candidates are looking for generic positions in certain geographic areas. Most postings, on the other hand, are very specific with respect to qualifications. This creates a mismatching problem with candidates finding ads for positions where they’re either over- or under-qualified. If they’re time pressed, or if it’s difficult to find a better match, they won’t apply. Talent hubs can minimize this problem by combining all similar jobs into a one-page landing site, and from here candidates can then be funneled off to the most comparable job. If the talent hub is SEO’d and made very compelling, not only will more candidates find it, but their apply rates will be much higher. Here are some articles on talent hubs. Email us if you’d like some more information on how to create these talent hubs.
13. Either build candidate-friendly career sites or find workarounds. Earlier it was suggested you try to find your open jobs from you career site’s home page. How easy was it? Now apply for one of them. Do you think a top person with little time, but ample opportunities, would endure this? Since you’re not going to redesign the process quickly, you’ll need to develop some alternative means to prevent people who come to your career site from leaving before at least sending a resume. One way is to expand the “Submit a Resume” section on your career site’s main page. Add some persuasive messaging and make it easy to just upload a resume. Since there are no OFCCP reporting requirements for people who apply this way (i.e., an Internet applicant is one who applies to a specific position), you don’t need much more information. Nurture these people through your CRM process and when opportunities arise recruiters can send compelling emails to appropriate candidates. In your email message describing the job ask those interested to submit a two-paragraph write-up of a major comparable accomplishment.
14. Push your ads to non-job board sites. Rather than waiting for candidates to find your ads, post them where candidates might find them indirectly. In the pay-per-click advice provided earlier it was suggested to buy keywords that a person might use when looking up some job-related technical information. This is an adaptation of the idea of posting ads on non-board sites, association and business group sites, social networks, or commonly used reference sites. For example, a posting for a financial manager might never be seen on theladders.com, but might standout on the local CPA or Financial Executive Institute (FEI) site. Even better, buy these terms as part of your pay-per-click program. Then when someone googles on “membership AND (FEI OR CPA),” your posting will magically appear nearby.
15. Use creative campaigns to drive traffic to your talent hubs or career site. Marketing isn’t limited to job board postings. Harrah’s sponsors an annual poker championship for MBA students. 3M sponsors Pi Sigma Epsilon’s national Sell-a-Thon and hires many of the winners for sales and marketing positions. Pizza Hut ran a campaign for a three-month VP of Pizza which drew thousands to their career site. Why not sponsor a technical or business case-study and offer a work-study fellowship? Or, what about offering a donation to a charity as the award for writing a promotional piece for the charity? You’ll probably find some good marketing people as a result. The creative ideas are endless as long as you follow through.

Much of what’s described here is fairly commonplace in most progressive companies. No one does it all, especially when technology is involved. Being proactive on this front offers a great opportunity to increase your share of top performers in a shrinking talent market. In this kind of market, you need to be pretty aggressive just to stay even. The key to remember in all of this is that the best people don’t look for jobs the same way average candidates do. The second big point is that following the herd is guaranteed to give you average results. The final big point is that being first is one way to gain a competitive sourcing advantage. So even if you stumble now and then, being different, creative, and compelling will allow you to keep your edge until another great idea comes along.