Sourcing Strategy

What is a sourcing strategy? How is it used in recruitment? What’s the best sourcing strategy for my business?

Questions that I’ve been asked by CEOs CFOs HR Directors, Recruitment Managers and more. I can tell them what a sourcing Strategy is and how it’s used in recruitment but the third question takes a lot of research, investigation and time before I can answer it.

What is a sourcing Strategy? 

A sourcing strategy is a predetermined strategy that has been created based upon a number of factors. It is the outcome of an in depth piece of work to identify the best candidates for an organisation and how to attract them using paid and unpaid outlets.

How is it used in Recruitment?

Once the sourcing strategy is defined it is used to attract the best calibre of talent to the organisation with the long term goal of hiring this talent. The sourcing strategy can include a number of outlets to raise awareness of roles including, paid and unpaid media, social media, internal promotions and referral programmes.

What is the best sourcing strategy for my business?

If I could answer this immediately I would be a very wealthy person! The best sourcing strategy for an organisation is determined by a number of factors:

• Target Demographic
• Recruitment Model
• Budget
• Recruitment Process

Target Demographic: This can be identified in a number of ways.  You can take your best employees and profile them to determine the demographic, you can look at your ideal employee fictionally or you can identify these using pre requisites of an employee.  The key is to understand what you are looking for before you go looking.

Recruitment Model: The recruitment model used, significantly impacts the sourcing strategy.  If you use a direct hiring model and have the end goal of having applicants apply directly to you we need to look at how to make these identified applicants aware you are hiring.  If however, you hire once or twice a year a different strategy maybe more cost efficient perhaps a fixed fee model or an agency.

Budget: Budget of course needs to be taken account of when looking at the sourcing strategy.  When looking at outlets to raise awareness of careers at an organisation we need to of course get the very best return on investment.  There are a number of outlets we can use including free and paid, we need to determine within the sourcing strategy which will yield the best return on investment.

Recruitment Process: The overall recruitment process needs to be taken into account when looking at the sourcing strategy due to a number of factors.  The time we have to recruit, the key milestones in which we measure in recruitment all need to be taken in to account when determining a sourcing strategy.

A sourcing strategy can be a minefield even for the most experienced of recruiters, there are thousands of media outlets that can be used but how to use them efficiently is key.

Contact us for a detailed consultation of your current recruitment and sourcing strategies.