3 Reasons Recruitment Agencies Should Focus on Candidate Sourcing
There’s a big difference between the things you should be doing and the thing you need to be doing. You should be exercising regularly and eating right, you need to breathe. While competing obligations and extenuating factors may prevent you from doing the former, nothing will stop you from achieving the latter.
With that said, you really need to seriously focus on your firm’s candidate sourcing efforts. No, it’s not quite at the level of breathing, but it can make a vital difference when it comes to your recruitment agency’s success. Here are three reasons why.
Skilled Candidates Are Hard to Find
Wait, great candidates are hard to come by? While it’s not exactly a revelation for anyone who works in recruitment, the impact of the talent shortage should not be underestimated. In the 2017 Australian Recruitment Trends Report, recruitment professionals cited the talent shortage as the top challenge for 2017.
Sixty-one percent of recruitment pros listed it as one of their top three challenges, ahead of pricing pressures and global economic uncertainty. Candidates are every firm’s greatest and most elusive asset, it only makes sense that finding and engaging them should be a top priority for your firm.
Business Is Booming
Candidates aren’t just in demand because of the talent shortage. Recruitment agencies are also seeing an increased demand for their services. Sixty-nine percent of recruitment pros expect hiring needs to increase in 2017. Forty-eight percent expect temp placements to increase.
With hiring needs on the rise and an increasingly competitive market for recruitment agencies, expect the effects of the talent shortage to be magnified: identifying and engaging skilled candidates will be more difficult than ever. The ability to find and provide high-quality candidates will separate the firms that succeed from the ones that struggle.
Everyone Else Is Doing It
This line of reasoning didn’t work when you wanted to get your nose pierced in middle school, but it does have implications for your recruitment agency when it comes to candidate sourcing efforts. If there is a limited pool of candidates, and recruiting firms are uniformly increasing efforts to identify top talent, the firms that don’t step up risk falling behind.
Why should you expect candidate sourcing efforts to improve for most recruitment agencies in 2017? Recruitment pros cited candidate acquisition as a top three priority for 2017, and more than 40 percent of respondents predicted an increase in operating budget and an increase in tech investments, respectively.
Given the vital role of sourcing in the talent acquisition process, it’s highly likely that firms will spend some of their resources on finding and engaging candidates, whether it manifests in better training, technology adoption, or on sourcing tools and advertising.
However, your investment in sourcing doesn’t have to be financial. Small actions like tracking source effectiveness or encouraging your recruitment team to adopt sourcing best practices can make a huge impact.
Want to take your sourcing efforts to the next level? Get the new ebook, Straight to The Source: Why Candidate Sourcing Matters and Tips For Success for interesting findings around the candidate acquisition landscape and sourcing tips that work.
