70% of talent leaders recently told us that growing pipeline is their top priority for 2021. We know that doing so requires great sourcing software... so we wrote this buyer's guide for you, wherever you are in your journey.
In a recent survey of over 500 talent acquisition professionals, nearly 70% of talent leaders told us that their #1 priority for 2021 was pipelining. Where they plan to invest their recruiting budget this year is reflective of that priority: 59% said they’d be investing in sourcing tools and tech. In fact, the importance of passive talent sourcing, pipelining, and automating those top-of-funnel processes came up again and again over the course of the survey: sourcers, recruiters, and talent leaders all identified “difficulty finding qualified candidates” as their top recruiting challenge; automation scored a 7/10 on a scale of importance; and while 49% of respondents said they used email automation to support remote hiring prior to COVID, 28% said they plan on adding it to their tech stack this year. This means that nearly three out of four talent teams will be using email automation to make processes more efficient, save time, and improve candidate experience in 2021 and beyond.
So we decided to write a Buyer's Guide for Prospective Candidate Sourcing Software for that 70% of talent leaders who said growing pipeline is their top priority, and for that 28% looking to add email automation to their tech stacks. Because now that you know what you need, how do you start to solve for it?
The pandemic clearly hasn’t eased the pervasive challenge of finding top talent and competing for it across industries, which is why so many sourcers and recruiters we’ve spoken with recently said that their “year of upskilling” in 2020 included learning and implementing new sourcing techniques and strategies. For many organizations, geography has been democratized and talent pools have opened exponentially. Opening those pools has meant more reachouts to more candidates within the same time constraints. Respondents to the aforementioned survey noted that “Competition is fierce and we have to touch on multiple channels and platforms in very little time; automation helps with this”; “With more reachouts due to opening up the candidate pool, the benefit of automation is huge. It’s otherwise so easy for things to fall through the cracks”; and “As the country reopens and the workforce is rebuilt, the numbers coming back in will be substantial—which will mean less time for us. Automation will be especially important then.”
Of course, your automation efforts are only as good as the talent you use them on, which is where sourcing as a talent acquisition strategy comes in. Sourcing is the process of actively seeking out, identifying, engaging, nurturing, and building relationships with talent (active and passive) for current open roles and roles that may be open in the future. It’s a proactive, rather than a reactive, endeavor, an outbound approach to target the best—and the best-fit—talent in the market, leading to qualified candidates being submitted into process who would not have applied on their own. Sourcing has these benefits:
Even in our post-COVID world, the term “talent scarcity” is as prevalent as ever. But the most mature talent acquisition teams don’t buy into this line of thinking. They recognize that there are plenty of skilled workers out there; many of them just happen to be working elsewhere. And the majority of them would be open to a career change if the offer was right. That’s why the Apples, Googles, and Amazons of the world have teams of dedicated sourcers—despite the fact that they’re inundated with applications.
Because of this new sourcing-and-nurturing paradigm, between 70% and 80% of “recruiting” happens prior to application now. And in our time-poor industry, sourcers and recruiters deserve technologies built just for them—ones that will automate or accelerate their sourcing and outreach tasks (email finding and automated follow-ups, for example), track every touchpoint they have with talent, offer metrics—and, by extension, best practices—to help them better understand their outreach, and give recruiters back their time so they can focus on things like candidate experience, making meaningful touchpoints with talent, and talent advisorship.
That’s where candidate sourcing software comes in. At Gem, we believe in the importance of sourcing so deeply that we’ve built our products around automating its processes—and not just automating them, but allowing recruiters to personalize the experience, and maintain that crucial human element, while doing so. Here’s what some of our customers report:
It’s clear to us at Gem that business leaders are more and more recognizing the importance of sourcing to their organizations. They’re empowering their TA teams to make strategic business decisions and rethinking their technology stacks to drive hiring efficiency and offer better candidate experiences. This empowerment puts TA teams in a tremendous position: to get to choose to implement sourcing as a strategy, and to decide what software they should use to do so. Of course, we feel pretty confident that Gem is one of your best options; but regardless of what solution you end up choosing, we’d like to be here to take the complexity out of your decision. We’re here to take the complexity out of that decision. So regardless of where you are in your journey, we’ve written this buyer’s guide as a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts. It answers all of these questions, according to where you are on your journey:
Regardless of which of the above questions you’re asking, we think you’ll find valuable information here to help you make the best investment for your team, your company, and your candidates. So jump in and start at the section that’s most relevant to you. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at gem.com. Answering questions is one of our favorite pastimes.
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