Finding great talent these days can be tough, especially with the lack of time you have to do it in.
You’re already starved for time. You’re busy searching, emailing and connecting, evaluating, scheduling, and meeting with candidates. On top of this, you have to manage the hiring managers: their requirements, changing minds, interview pipelines and more. There isn’t enough time especially for you to do what you do best: using your unique perception skills as super-connectors to relate to and interview candidates.
And, to top it all off, its often surprising to step back and think that this general pain (a lack of time) is often exacerbated by the technologies that are supposed to be making our lives easier. Instead of reacting to the pain points, let’s dig in and discover how we can counter the top 5 problems before they start! Shall we?
So, what are the 5 biggest issues when it comes to talent sourcing and recruiting?
- False positives, or irrelevant profiles without ALL our must have skills
- Talent isn’t prioritized
- Profiles with outdated data
- Not enough talent on the list
- Candidates are not ready to move
Now, let’s take a look at some of the root causes of these pain points and a great solution to counter them.
1. False Positives – Irrelevant Profiles without ALL our must have skills
Often when we build our searches in sourcing platforms we get hundreds, sometimes thousands of candidates in our search results; most of which MISS the skills we require.
Why Does this Happen?
Many sourcing tools DO NOT have the ability to create “AND” scenarios, which means it reads your key words as “OR” only. For example, if you are looking for a sales person with phone skills “AND” negotiation skills “AND” closing skills, you will receive talent with AT LEAST only 1 of these skills as opposed to ALL 3. This also means that most of the talent presented to you in the search results will MISS the other 2 required skills. An example of a proper “AND” filtered search would be on your favorite hotel booking site. You want a 5-star hotel “AND” breakfast “AND” a pool. And you expect that you will be only shown hotels with all of these criteria. How angry would you be if you turned up at a 1-star motel with no pool that provided boxed cereal next to the kettle in your room for breakfast? That’s what you get in most recruiting tools.
How do we fix it?
Paycor Smart Sourcing allows you to go beyond Boolean, or traditional search methods with limitations and uses a completely new process to create the ideal list of candidates. Instead of finding exact matches, Paycor Smart Sourcing aggregates candidate profiles that might miss keywords or combinations of keywords entered in a search. It also considers inferred skills that candidates likely possess but do not always mention.
2. Talent isn’t Prioritized
There is talent which exists within the search that matches our job requirements, but it is located incredibly far down in the results list. For example, if you are looking for a software engineer with AWS, Java, and HTML. Five candidates may possess all 3 skills, but in a search list of 1,000 people they could be positioned as number 3, 72, 177, 533, 842 etc. It is often completely random.
Why Does this Happen?
Unbelievably, most talent souring or recruiting tools DO NOT have an intelligent way to prioritize the talent. It can be done, but most current tools have not been developed enough to do so. It’s misleading in some cases, as tools actually ask you to differentiate between “required” and “preferred” skills – leading us to believe that this would eventually result in prioritizing profiles accordingly. But that’s rarely the case!
The other reason many sourcing companies are not able to prioritize their talent lists is because they do not actually have the full list of candidates at the start. Instead, they give you a partial pool of candidates upon launching the search. This instant, un-prioritized list allows sourcers to work right away, but they are ultimately time wasters. Beware! How can they prioritize the best talent if they don’t have the full list at the time they give it to you?
How do we fix it?
Paycor Smart Sourcing uses AI to look for the right talent, regardless of job titles or exact matches because it understands that there can be many job titles for qualified candidates. It also allows you to train its algorithms so that it can find the correct talent you are looking for and exclude irrelevant candidates.
3. Profiles with Outdated Data
We often see that profiles in sourcing tools are outdated. The profiles miss skills, have wrong current companies, present wrong titles, etc. All this misleads us. How can you, as a recruiter, make decisions on a poor data set? We end up chasing and engaging people who are irrelevant dead ends. How many times has this happened? How much time is wasted here? Way too much.
Why does this happen?
Most sourcing tools have agreements with large databases that provide resume details. Through these agreements, sourcing tools either receive a data dump once every 12 months or are allowed to “ping” their data for new data every 6-12 months or so. To put this into perspective, if a database dump is performed into the sourcing tool’s database on January 1, and a profile is changed on January 2, then for 355 days you will be receiving outdated, incomplete profiles.
How do we fix it?
Paycor Smart Sourcing uses AI technology to collect fresh data from hundreds of sources to build rich, updated talent profiles. Additionally, it is designed to eliminate old-school keyword search and intelligently prioritize talent by their quality and propensity to change jobs (among other things).
4. There is not enough talent on the list
You’ve likely experienced this one before: you have entered all of your requirements into a system and hit the button, and you are presented with so few prospects that all the time inputting your criteria feels like a waste. Suddenly, you have to spend even more time reworking your search, trying to figure out the magic combination that will yield an appropriate number of candidates.
Why does this happen?
Most searches rely on Boolean searches of exact keywords. Those keywords have to be input by the searcher, and they have to have been written by the prospective candidates on their profiles. This does not allow for any margin of error; actually none. There’s either a match or no match. Many candidates, especially passive candidates, do not have extensive online profiles. They do not list all of their relevant skills, or their updated skills. And these tools do not extrapolate skills from titles. That leaves the recruiter in the predicament of either having a long list of irrelevant candidates or a list of candidates which is too short to return an ROI on the search.
How do we fix it?
Try another method. Paycor Smart Sourcing finds and engages with both passive and active candidates. It taps into the world’s largest database of passive candidates (1.5 billion profiles) and contacts the best candidates for every role. For active job seekers, it posts jobs on thousands of job sites, and campaigns them programmatically, enabling you to optimize exposure and spend.
5. Candidates are not ready to move
After hours, days, sometimes even weeks of searching, you have identified a short-list of candidates who would be PERFECT for the position. The problem is that most or all of them are perfectly comfortable at their current jobs.
Why does this happen?
Most tools don’t have a way to identify whether passive candidates are also passive job seekers. They use a single source to retrieve profiles, don’t follow online fingerprints of candidates, but most importantly don’t have a predictive algorithm that accurately calculates a candidate’s propensity to move.
How do we fix it?
Paycor Smart Sourcing gathers information from multiple sources to predict a candidate’s activity and historical movements, combining that with a solid algorithm, to uncover who could be ready to move. Paycor Smart Sourcing will help you get to the best candidates before other recruiters! And, getting those passive candidates can be key to finding the very best talent more quickly.