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Sourcing Basics: Stop Throwing Away Good Candidates for Bad Reasons

By Lou Adler, March 19, 2008

I can't remember a time when recruiters, recruiting managers, hiring managers, HR executives and company leaders didn't complain about the lack of good candidates. When the Internet and job boards came along we were promised the solution was at hand. But more than 10 years later the problems in finding talent have gotten worse, not better. Perhaps, just perhaps, the solution to better sourcing is not better sourcing.

Read more articles by this author.

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When you look at hiring from an end-to-end perspective about half the problems in hiring good people have more to do with bad job descriptions, incorrect assessments, managers who have no idea of how to recruit, and recruiters who have trouble influencing and closing top performers. The other 50% of the problems can be attributed to bad sourcing. These can be solved by better advertising, better marketing, and better use of technology. So stop spending more money on sourcing. Instead, fix the rest of the problems first.

I equate hiring top performers as a business process similar to manufacturing. My early industry background was in high-volume consumer handheld electronics and automotive components, so this comparison is easy to make. In a factory if you have excessive scrap, you need to either buy extra raw materials or eliminate the scrap. Typically, excessive scrap is due to a combination of bad specs, inconsistent processes, and weak controls. In hiring these are equivalent to weak job descriptions, managers who evaluate the wrong things incorrectly, and the lack of metrics. This requires recruiters to go find more raw materials-hot prospects, in this case. Unfortunately they use boring advertising and old-fashion selling techniques to attract this diminishing supply of coveted raw materials. Then to make matters worse, when finalists are selected and offers are about to be made, recruiters and managers stumble through some clumsy closing process, either paying too much or losing the candidate to a more professional and astute buyer. When viewed in this light, the idea of buying more raw materials or looking for more candidates makes no sense until the rest of the processes are fixed.

With this in mind, evaluate your end-to-end hiring, sourcing, assessment, and recruiting processes on the following factors. (If you don't know the answer, count it as a problem.) If you identify more than 10 non-sourcing problems affecting your sourcing, your sourcing scrap rate is the real problem, not your sourcing.

Non-sourcing Problems Directly Affecting Sourcing Results

1. Job descriptions are boring.
2. Application process is too long and top candidates opt-out.
3. Managers don't spend enough time clarifying real job needs.
4. Managers refuse to see good candidates, because they don't have exactly the right background.
5. Managers exclude good candidates due to incorrect assessments.
6. Managers don't respond quickly enough when resumes are sent to them.
7. Good candidates are unimpressed with our interviewing process.
8. Good candidates are unimpressed with the hiring manager.
9. Good candidates want to know the comp before talking.
10. Passive candidates want to know the details of the job before even talking.
11. Recruiters over-rely on skills and experience to screen candidates.
12. ATS resume database is cumbersome to use and difficult to search for candidates.
13. Candidates increasingly are rejecting offers or accepting other offers or better offers.
14. We can't attract the best people with our comp packages.
15. Managers over-specify skills, experience, academics, and industry background.
16. We are facing business challenges.
17. Relocation is a problem.
18. We can't move fast enough to decide and make offers.
19. Managers aren't responsive or involved enough.
20. We never have enough time to do it right.

How many unnecessary extra candidates do you need to find to overcome all of the good candidates that were lost for the above preventable reasons? Many of these non-sourcing problems are attributed to weak planning, lack of training, dumb policies, bad processes, and inadequate technology. When viewed from this perspective it's apparent that there's a lot of non-sourcing stuff that can be done to help reduce the need to see more candidates.

However, since sourcing will always be an issue, you should also rank yourself and company on these sourcing-related problems. Improvement here will have a direct and immediate impact on the quality of the candidates you'll see.

Sourcing-related Problems

1. The quality and quantity of candidates from job boards is declining.
2. We tend to use the same sourcing methods every year.
3. Our advertising is boring and out-dated.
4. Our job ads are just cut-and-paste versions of our boring job descriptions.
5. Ads are hard to find by top people who are casually looking.
6. Ads are found, but top candidates don't apply.
7. Our ads don't describe a compelling value proposition.
8. Our ads are filled with disqualifiers and little about what's in it for the candidate.
9. Our ads are written to exclude bad people, not attract good people.
10. Our career website is difficult to navigate and search for jobs.
11. We don't use web analytics to track response by ad.
12. We have not search-engine-optimized our site or our ads.
13. Our ads don't always come up first on the job boards we use.
14. Good candidates say they're "not interested" early in the process.
15. We don't get enough high-quality referrals.
16. Too many voice mails are needed to get callbacks.
17. We make too many cold calls to passive candidates.
18. High-potential candidates with slightly different skills would not naturally apply to our ads.
19. Our CRM system and resume database is difficult to use and not very effective.
20. Our employees don't proactively seek out great people to refer.

These are just the basics. It's not even a complete list of current sourcing programs. You need to have this stuff mastered before you start adding creative campaigns, using advanced Internet consumer marketing concepts and some of the latest technology like YouTube, social networking, RSS feeds, and podcasts. Even though it's not easy finding top talent, companies make it much more difficult than it needs to be. For one thing, a lot of good people become scrap due to bad processes and untrained recruiters and interviews. This puts an extra burden on the need to see more candidates. Since most sourcing processes aren't very strong to begin with, the challenge is even more difficult. On top of this, throw in metrics that are improperly used, or non-existent, and the lack of process control and feedback systems. This is no way to run a factory.