Sourcing, in today’s highly volatile employee-centric recruitment landscape, has become a cornerstone to the success of any organization as it redefines the cost structure and enhances their competitive ability by reducing the time to hire. Although sourcing and recruiting are used interchangeably they are essentially two disparate processes. It’s true to say without sourcing there is no recruitment. Sourcing enables a preemptive approach to fill the company’s talent pool and generating prospective leads. Quite often, though, in the race to reduce time to hire, the hiring managers or the procurement team overlook the bigger picture and end up sabotaging the entire sourcing strategy. Organizations in their bid to reduce hiring cost to depend heavily on the sourcing teams to provide them with low cost, high-value resources but even one of the following sourcing mistakes might prove detrimental in the overall scheme of things.

•    Spending too much time searching the internet for quality candidates might result in missing the time to hire deadline due to an enormous resultant unstructured data. It’s always better to leverage the data off your internal database as it avoids any scope of false positives and irrelevant results and has a better chance of furnishing the best fit for the role candidate.
•    Employee engagement is a must in today’s recruitment landscape as it lays the foundation of a long-term symbiotic relationship. Failure to effectively engage with candidates is akin to an “unfaithful and untrustworthy” marriage in which insecurity galore. Constant engagement via communication either verbally or via an email creates an environment of respect and invigorates the image of an organization.
•    Over dependency on generic search and not researching and refining searches, result in “too much data with less value” situation. Regular review of the search criteria and sourcing tools increases the possibility of finding the most viable candidates from the human capital data. For example, in the search criteria, one should be aware of how to use the “NOT” Boolean operator to sift the wheat from the chaff.
•    A very familiar saying “don’t judge the book by its cover” holds the fort when it comes to understanding the candidate based on their resumes. Sourcing should not be subservient to personal prejudices as it will cloud the judgment of scouting a potential match.
•    Technology is at the center of every enhancement and advancement. The same holds true for all the sourcing technology platform and its imperative that before an organization renews their contract with the sourcing technology provider they should run through a comprehensive evaluation checklist in commensuration with their rejigged goals and requirements.

In this digitally active time, sourcing through data resulting from algorithms driven sourcing tools enables HR professionals to tap, attract and engage suitable and relevant candidates at a precision level never seen before. It’s necessary not to make the sourcing mistakes discussed above in order to remain relevant and have a constant availability and relationship with the best talent pool in the market.