Sourcing – It’s Not the Hunt That’s the Thrill

We hear the same thing repeatedly from staffing and recruiting professionals – sourcing is inefficient. In effect, it’s like “big game hunting” or a “fishing expedition,” hunting or catching the prize one at a time. Unlike those pursuits, when it comes to beating your competition, there’s no thrill in the hunt. The thrill is in the placement.A recent market research survey conducted by Bullhorn shows that 73 percent of recruiters still cold call candidates. And while the move to technology in the last several years has been a stampede – 87 percent use job boards, 74 percent use social networks, and 56 percent use sourcing tools – the process isn’t really any more efficient. Using all of that technology might cast a wider net, but it’s complicated to put into practice – there’s just too much of it to deal with! Instead of letting the job sites, social networks and sourcing tools control your time, it’s about time recruiters were in control.

At Bullhorn, we’re making the sourcing of candidates an automated and core part of staffing and recruiting firm’s front office software. Similar to the model in which some managers use RSS technology to get their daily news feeds, Bullhorn envisions all web-based information about job candidates automatically integrated right into Bullhorn, dramatically decreasing the time it takes to source and place candidates. Think about it: how much time would you and your staff save by automating the posting of jobs and the searching of candidates? Consider all the data and information available on the web – through job boards, social networks, sourcing solutions and selection tools – and imagine if all of those resources delivered their information directly to you. Job openings could be posted in real-time directly to job boards at the click of a mouse. Applicant responses would then be automatically parsed and indexed into your desktop applications. Open job orders would be automatically extended to any job board or site, creating a powerful way to open job management and sourcing capabilities across the Internet to wherever candidates live. Recruiters could create candidate search agents against open job orders, selecting multiple job boards and sites to search and harvest resumes. Once a search is completed, the highest ranked candidates would be automatically parsed into the recruiter’s database. All of those multiple windows and applications will go away and all of the information and tools you use most will be fully integrated with your email, applicant tracking and job management systems. Effectively, the sourcing of candidates will be transformed from a laborious, single minded task into a highly automated process that allows the recruiter to focus on the quality and speed of making multiple placements.

Additionally, candidate records become “evergreen,” updated automatically as new information about the candidates becomes available on the job boards, social networks and other Internet sites. Recruiters now have a single source for up-to-date information on candidates, aggregating information publicly available from the Web and internal notes, history and activity. Bullhorn recently partnered with both CareerBuilder.com and Monster to integrate candidate sourcing and job posting between the popular job boards and Bullhorn’s On Demand staffing and recruiting front office. Many recruiters and staffing professionals also use software to gauge candidates’ skills and offer online tests. Rather than asking candidates to re-take the tests whenever they meet with a new recruiter, it is more efficient to make the results available online. Bullhorn envisions the next step in which test results are automatically associated with candidates’ other files and information and available to qualified recruiters. Skills assessment, personality and cognitive assessment and background checking will all become solutions that are seamlessly integrated with desktop software. Having this information at their fingertips will enable recruiters to present the highest quality candidates in the shortest amount of time to fill a job order. Bullhorn has already partnered with SkillCheck, a First Advantage Company, to provide recruiters instant access to scoring information for any job applicant who has taken a SkillCheck skills or behavioral assessment. The scoring information will appear immediately within candidate records within Bullhorn. Many staffing and recruiting professionals already realize that an On Demand, integrated front office changes the nature of the game so that recruiters consistently beat their competition to placements.

With a “dashboard-like” integrated front office, everything from generating multiple job orders to placing candidates is fully automated with 360 degree visibility of the candidate and job process. Now it’s possible to use an automated front office to simplify the posting of multiple job orders and the sourcing of candidates to and from job sites and social networks. And recruiters no longer need to hunt “big game” one at a time. They’re increasing the number of opportunities they can work on at once and focusing on where the real thrill is – the placement.