Sourcing candidates is far more complex than simply advertising for vacant positions. It is a multi-faceted approach that involves establishing your employer brand through to ensuring you have the appropriate recruitment technology and processes in place.
Key insights to sourcing candidates
As a leading recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider, here are Cielo’s key insights into how an RPO can ensure you are sourcing the right candidates at the right time.
1. Getting the right messaging to the right people at the right time
The first step in delivering any sourcing strategy is ensuring your employer brand and your employee value proposition (EVP) are right. In today’s competitive market, talented potential candidates are increasingly focused on what a role and an organization can offer them and their career. Furthermore, they have ever-increasing access to information about your organization – and what the experience of being an employee there is like – a proportion of which is not controlled by you.
From employee rating platforms such as Glassdoor and Indeed, to press articles and your employee’s social media, there is a huge amount of information out there for a candidate to sample. Your employer brand needs to be an authentic representation of your organization, engaging directly with each candidate to deliver a steady stream of information and topics of most interest.
The more targeted your employer branding messaging is, the better. The world of recruitment is delivering increasingly sophisticated target profiling that covers a great deal more than simply someone’s current job title or location and can deliver associative retargeting to keep engagement with potential candidates who’ve shown an interest in your brand. At Cielo, our recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) function has both the technology and the employer branding expertise to deliver such complex targeted online marketing strategies.
2. Technology that harnesses the power of data
RPOs can offer economies of scale that not only save cost, but also deliver invaluable data, allowing for the evolution of an ever more targeted and effective online sourcing function. An in-house talent acquisition function might search for candidates or advertise roles on a one-by-one basis or on a smaller scale. At Cielo, our RPO service can cluster jobs, deliver overnight and automated searches, and use AI to continually refine how talent is located.
By testing the efficacy of different messaging and media for different segments of your audience, we can help you to personalize your advertising more accurately. Using a wide range of data points from initial outreach to hire, we can pinpoint a message that is gaining traction – for example flexible working patterns – analyze what sector of the audience it is resonating with, and then focus their future communications on this key theme. The result is a strategy that evolves to be ever more cost-effective and engaging to your candidates.
This isn’t the only way an RPO can help you personalize your messaging whilst also gathering invaluable data from your employer marketing. BOTs on a career’s website are a good way of providing information that’s tailored to a candidate’s needs. From seeing a targeted advert on Facebook or LinkedIn, the individual is driven to your site, and can directly ask questions that are most relevant to them. Not only does this increase candidate engagement – it also provides you with invaluable data about what your candidates are unsure of, which you can use to further evolve your employer brand messaging.
3. Offering flexibility, scale and focus
An RPO can offer you access to a huge range of expertise and know-how for you to pick from, offering real flexibility. At Cielo, for example, we can customize our candidate outreach services to be delivered in any one of 30 languages as well as providing you with experts who can help shape your employer branding or transform your recruitment technology.
At the same time, an RPO can offer real focus, too. Our teams of experts can concentrate solely on end-to-end talent acquisition, from creating an EVP to sourcing, candidate engagement, assessment and onboarding. Not only does this free up HR business partners to concentrate on other key projects, it also speeds up recruitment, drives candidate engagement, lowers attrition levels, and allows for the evidence-based evolution of processes.
4. Empowering you to make informed strategic decisions
An RPO can also help inform important strategic business decisions where larger scale recruitment is an important factor. Take the example where a business expansion requires that you create a new IT center within Europe. At Cielo, our expert analysts and researchers can help you explore the feasibility of different markets.
- Which is better, the Czech Republic or Poland in terms of employee skills at the right price point?
- Where is the largest concentration of the language skills you require?
- What might the timescales look like to hire the talent you need – and to expand it further in different markets?
In this way, our RPO services can help in-house HR deliver major strategic initiatives in a more cost-effective and efficient manner, by ensuring that expansion initiatives are matched to relevant talent pools.
5. Empowering you to develop a skills-based workforce
Skill-based planning is an increasingly important facet of any organization's medium and long-term talent strategy. The very first step is to accurately define exactly what skills are essential to your business – now and in the future. At Cielo, our RPO experts can help you to define this accurately, either by designing a framework for you to work with, or by providing the actual project managers to deliver the work for you. Our experts can liaise with your business leaders, hiring and line managers to build an accurate picture of the core skills your business needs to drive growth.
6. Access to intelligence and sharing expertise
At Cielo, our RPO experts have access to key information on recruitment markets from a range of intelligence groups, which can be easily fed into your recruitment processes. For example, if your organization is looking for a number of engineers in Northern Italy, we can quickly answer a range of key research questions.
- What is the average job turnover time in these roles?
- What are your target audiences’ main drivers in changing jobs?
- What is the salary range?
We also produce monthly and quarterly business reviews for our clients in the TA and HR space, sharing insights, benchmarking and the latest market data in an easily digestible format – and offer additional information in the form of more detailed articles and data in your areas of particular interest. Clients also benefit from being linked up to a network of their peers. We facilitate sessions where best practice can be shared, allowing you to glean knowledge from those recruiting in your sector and beyond, across multiple business areas, locations and countries.
An RPO with Cielo provides organizations with a comprehensive sourcing strategy that ensures companies are staying one step ahead of their competitors by attracting, hiring and retaining the best candidates to meet their business goals.