Recently we discussed the difference between proactive and reactive recruiting and how a proactive approach is often considered the best option with regards to long-term goals. This started a conversation at Starcircle about how sourcing can be categorised into two clearly defined approaches; reactive and strategic. It also made us realise that Starcircle can help a company benefit greatly from one of these approaches but more on that later. First off, let’s take a look at what both types of sourcing consist of.
What is reactive sourcing?
Reactive sourcing is when you try to find suitable candidates for a role or roles that are already open. This is more of a short-term approach and is often used by smaller companies with no dedicated recruitment staff or a smaller recruitment budget. It’s also used when unexpected and unplanned-for vacancies arise within a company.
What is strategic sourcing?
Strategic sourcing is when a company fills their candidate pipeline with people who may be suitable for positions as and when they become available within the company. It’s a long-term approach that helps to accelerate your time to hire and reduce any loss of productivity due to a lengthy transitioning period.
What’s the difference between the two?
The major difference between the two is that a reactive approach addresses your current needs while a strategic approach helps you plan for the future.
As we mentioned earlier, reactive sourcing is sometimes considered the only option for smaller companies with tighter budgets. While we disagree with that assumption, we can understand why companies may feel that way. They may lack the funds or the staff to invest the time and effort into a strategic approach.
However, there are ways that a company can adopt a strategic approach without investing too heavily and in our opinion, it’s something that they really should look into.
Again, we’ll explain how a little later but for now let’s see why we think that strategic sourcing trumps a reactive approach by having a look at the benefits of the former.
The benefits of strategic sourcing
Lower your time to hire
A strategic approach to sourcing your candidates means that at any given time you should have a candidate pipeline brimming with talent. These qualified candidates are in your pipeline because you know that they have the potential to not only handle the role but also fit in with your work culture.
With these candidates already on hand and primed for contact, you can drastically reduce your time to hire and pull suitable people in for interview almost immediately.
Nurture candidates’ interest
As we all know, candidates in your pipeline need to be nurtured. This is done by being consistent in your efforts to keep them engaged. This can be through regular company updates on social media, newsletters, blog posts, or even just a simple text message to ask how they are doing.
With a strategic approach to sourcing, you have the opportunity to do all of this allowing you plenty of time to warm up those potential candidates before any positions become available.
A reactive approach, on the other hand, means that each one of those calls to a potential candidate is a cold one. And we all know that warm is better than cold, right?
Improve the quality of your hires
With less pressure to deliver candidates before a deadline, you can afford to take more time sourcing only those professionals that you feel are the right fit. And since this is a long-term approach, the vast majority of those will be passive candidates.
As you are probably well aware, passive candidates are a pretty big deal. You’ll often find the very best talent within their ranks, and should you hire one, they are 25% more likely to stay with the company long-term.
How Starcircle can help
At this point, there are no prizes for guessing which approach we advocate here at Starcircle. In our opinion, the benefits of strategic sourcing make it an essential component of any successful long-term recruitment plan.
However, there’s more to strategic sourcing than simply spending your day scrolling through a LinkedIn search sending connection requests ad nauseam.
At Starcircle, we’re big supporters of artificial intelligence and using every tool and piece of data available to make better recruitment and sourcing decisions. But we also believe that the more important sourcing decisions are best made by a person with experience in the field.
That’s why we combine human intuition with artificial intelligence and talent analytics to allow our clients to take advantage of a strategic approach to sourcing.
Many clients have found that by outsourcing their sourcing efforts to Starcircle, (what a sourcing mouthful!) their own recruitment processes are largely administrative. Through our use of talent analytics and that element of human intuition, Starcircle is able to provide them with a candidate pipeline of pre-qualified candidates.
As a client, all you need to do is nurture the candidates in your respective pipelines before holding interviews when a position becomes available.
We believe that adopting this strategic approach has brought a huge range of benefits to our clients not least of which is that accelerated time to hire we spoke of earlier.
If you’d like to see how Starcircle can help you take advantage of strategic sourcing, then book a free no obligation demo today. In terms or sourcing, it could be your best decision yet.
