The recruiting landscape has become a highly competitive environment. As a result, HR professionals find it increasingly challenging to source candidates.

Understanding who to target when there is access to larger pools of talent becomes a much trickier subject. However, the road to hiring suitable candidates can be a pleasant and streamlined one by chalking out a foolproof sourcing plan. To onboard the best employees for your organization, here are a few strategic talent acquisition practices that will strike a chord with active candidates.

Streamlining Strategic Talent Acquisition with Smarter Sourcing Strategies

Creating your candidate persona

As you explore the talent market for the best possible candidate, building an ideal candidate persona becomes a must-have part of it to help you fast-track the process. Your candidate persona is a semi-fictional representation of your candidate. This semi-fictional representation should include everything that you want from your hires.

Using strategic talent acquisition, HR teams can utilize the collected personas to understand the recruitment strategies that best fit to connect with the candidate. More commonly used in formulating marketing strategies to approach the target audience, the candidate process has also become valuable to the recruitment process in helping with the following tasks:

• Creating relevant job descriptions and sourcing more applications
• Understanding the best recruiting communities and platforms to target potential candidates

With AI-backed talent intelligence tools of today, you get to deep-dive into the candidate persona and look at the necessary information for hiring. Your talent managers also get a 360-degree perspective on individual profiles across numerous parameters. Using strategic talent acquisition, you eventually save ample time, and end up analyzing various applicants within a small time frame.

Identifying talent hotspots

Identifying talent that aligns with your location and role can become an arduous and overly complicated process. Organizations are increasingly adopting AI-powered strategic talent acquisition solutions in their recruitment process to have unparalleled access to global talent data and insights based on the target location for a target role.

By leveraging the right talent intelligence tools, such as Draup, organizations can discover emerging global talent hotspots, learn skills architecture, and empower their hiring leaders to make data-driven decisions. Talent management teams can also utilize this data to craft the best future-focused workforce plans and grow faster with the emerging trends.

Furthermore, AI-powered strategic talent acquisition works as a cost-cutting tool in helping HR teams arrive at a decent compensation package by comparing a variety of roles and locations to discover what works best. By effectively cutting down on costs, organizations can avoid losses resulting from attrition rates and improve retention rates.

Scout for talent from ATS

Sourcing and connecting to a large talent pool is a time-consuming process for HR teams. With the introduction of the application tracking system or ATS into strategic talent acquisition, this demanding process of manually sifting through countless applications is now seeing a decline.

Starbucks, Airbnb, Nike, and Squarespace are among the majority of Fortune 500 companies that leverage ATS to recruit ideal candidates. This non-traditional approach to hiring helps streamline most of your talent management team’s tasks by posting job offerings on multiple sites, candidate sorting, and interview scheduling.

This technology-powered approach has certainly overhauled the recruitment process. Its effectiveness in helping acquisition specialists move away from the monotonous duties faster by supporting them throughout the recruitment process is reaping the rewards in many ways.

Only a strong employer branding can make a difference

Putting in some hard work to revamp your brand will help you attract and retain the best candidates for the job. Employers not paying attention to creating an everlasting strategic talent acquisition plan with their brand will never garner the eyeballs of the right talent force.

Case in point, more than 90% of candidates consider quitting their jobs to join a company with an excellent brand reputation. With never-before-accessible talent pools courtesy of a hybrid work model, a strong employer brand will prove to be more cost-effective in hiring the suitable fit for your organization.

To boost your employer brand, here are a few tried and tested methods that work:

• Investing time in response: Reviews are critical as they portray the most honest image of your organization. Numerous studies reveal that a vast proportion of candidates check company reviews before they make a decision. Using strategic talent acquisition, HR teams must regularly check popular review sites and respond to the feedback of candidates. By doing so, you instill confidence in the minds of those entering your workforce.
• Developing an out-of-the-box content strategy: Valuable content can help your company stand out, establish expertise, and build trust. Modern job-seekers want to work for employers that personalize recruiting content to engage with them. Storytelling is the most lucrative form of content that instantly resonates with potential candidates.

Another crucial element that is better to avoid while building a strong employer brand is not exaggerating the workplace culture. If you can do that, a significant part of your strategic talent acquisition will take care of itself.

Go to their world: Using social media platforms

Lastly, it is the social media platforms that come as a boon in this new era of work, as they become increasingly popular to advertise jobs and interact with prospects. Modern-day recruiters are spending considerable time scouting for potential active candidates on social media platforms. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are being utilized by HR teams for strategic talent acquisition.

Using strategic talent acquisition, create a unique social media recruiting strategy that will help your HR teams zero in on quality active candidates and connect with passive ones. Besides working as a great recruiting tool, social media platforms also help grow your social media presence.

Post implementing the practices mentioned above in your candidate sourcing process, you’ll be well on your way to recruiting powerhouse teams across departments. Companies are now utilizing the power of AI and ML in recruitment and retention.

AI-powered talent intelligence platforms like Draup help HR leaders with in-depth strategic talent acquisition insights on the talent ecosystem. This recruitment tool assists organizations in strategic workforce planning, talent recruitment, and reskilling by evaluating talent ecosystem pillars such as industries, companies, locations, and professionals.

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