The process for sourcing talent

There’s no debating that the most important asset of your company is your team. So when building your team, why wouldn’t you want to approach it with the same rigor that you approach building a product. With every new job requisition you create, it’s critical to create a unique sourcing strategy to attract and hire the right candidates.

What exactly is a “sourcing strategy”?

The process of finding candidates for a specific role. Different strategies will attract different types of candidates. Once you have a sourcing strategy defined, you will be able to measure how efficient your strategy is and make adjustments to improve the results. Recruiters use a combination of sourcing strategies for a specific job requisition. There is not one single way to approach finding the right candidate. Most searches require a combination of both inbound and outbound sourcing. The more niche/specific the search, the more outbound sourcing the search will require relative to inbound sourcing efforts.

Sourcing strategies

• Outbound sourcing: The process of building relationships with potential candidates by proactively reaching out to candidates via phone and email. Often entails using tools such as LinkedIn, Github or Sourcing.io.
• Inbound sourcing: The process of vetting candidate that apply to a posted job requisition or are referred to an specific role by employees or external contacts.

Posting/Sourcing Resources

With hundreds of posting and sourcing resources out there, it’s difficult to know where to market your roles. We’ve narrowed this list down to three resources that we believe are the best for posting and sourcing for all tech, product, and G&A roles for start up companies.

LinkedIn Recruiter Premium

• What
  • Post jobs
  • Connect (view and contact anyone on LI)
  • Find the right talent with sourcing tools
  • Stock talent pool and create shortlists
• Cost
  • $150/month per seat
• Why and when
  • When you have someone on team who is ready to start doing outbound sourcing (InMails). You don’t need to have an internal recruiter. You need to have an engaged founder/employee who makes recruiting/sourcing a priority. This is the early stage where founders are spending approximately 50% of their time recruiting. Sourcing emails are coming directly from the founder’s LinkedIn account. You can download Connectifier (a tool for finding someone’s email and or phone number) so you can use someone’s email versus sending a LinkedIn message. This may get a higher response rate with candidates. Once an internal recruiter is hired, the recruiter takes over the management of all things LinkedIn.

AngelList

• What
• Post jobs and source candidates (focus on start up companies)
• Cost
  • Free!
• Why and when
  • As soon as possible. Since there is no cost, AngelList is a great place post your role(s). AngelList is good for junior to mid level roles.

Hired.com

• What
  • Hired.com has proven to be a good matchmaking source for engineering hires ranging from individual contributor developer roles to lead engineer/manager roles. The time to use Hired is when you’ve exhausted your internal and external resources but may not be ready to use a contingency recruiter. The cost of using a contingency recruiter is slightly higher.