There are dozens of options for job sourcing and it can be hard to choose between them, but the smart recruiters are learning how to effectively use both free and paid channels to get the right employees for their company.
The best way to break down these channels is to think of them in terms of organic and sponsored sources. Both have a place in job sourcing, and knowing how to leverage them appropriately means more efficient budget allocation and longer-lasting employees.
There are a number of free (which is to say “organic”) channels available in job recruiting that you could be taking advantage of. Google has recently entered into the job sourcing arena and Facebook has spent the past couple of years improving their systems to take better advantage of their 2 billion users to connect people with jobs, to use a few examples.
Even Glassdoor, one of the most popular job sourcing channels on the Internet, has a free service that can be used in finding the right candidates for your particular positions.
The problem with organic channels is that they can be difficult to filter through. Part of what allows them to remain free is that they have very light support and aren’t curated in the same way as paid channels are, so it becomes tougher to sift your preferred candidates from less qualified ones.
That’s why the best way to utilize organic channels is through a system that can scrape those channels for candidates and filter them automatically based on your job description, bringing you only the people who best fit with what you’re looking for and directing others to positions that might be better suited to their talents.
If organic doesn’t fill all of your jobs, you might start looking into paid channels. There are a number of them available, from Indeed to Stack Overflow, that will charge you per listing or per click. While they may offer some free services, because they are so popular, paid posts that are placed at the top of searches are the most effective way to use them.
If organic placement is like search engine optimization for your website, sponsored placement is more akin to PPC advertising. You’re paying to have your job show up when people are looking for that kind of position, and generally bidding against your competitors for the top spot.
While this can get more expensive, especially when it comes to high skilled jobs with few qualified candidates, it also allows you to more accurately target the people you want and positions your company as a leader that would be a good home for the kind of applicants you’re searching for.
The biggest trick to working with these types of channels is to have a strategy in place that plays to their strengths while meeting your goals.
Programmatic platforms like Talentify can help you balance these by using machine learning to scrape organic channels, fill the jobs it can from those sources, then carefully balance your paid approach so that you’re getting the most from your recruiting budget. It’s not unreasonable to say that if you can fill most positions for free, you’re going to, and after that you want to spend your money on the channels that are producing high quality applicants. AI driven systems are designed for that exact purpose.
By leveraging both organic and sponsored sources in the right way, you’ll be able to better find the people you need to make your business run.