Talent Sourcing involves a multi-pronged approach, from developing alumni pipelines to targeted internet job ads. No matter your approach, the best sourcing strategy can come through centralized recruitment with a core team keyed into the process.
Centralizing the recruiting process involves creating a dedicated hiring team that works with hiring managers and candidates alike through the entire process, from sourcing to onboarding. The aim of centralization is to create efficiency—if a new hire is dealing with the same person from the job interview, to the onboarding process, and even throughout ongoing HR issues like salary increases, it can create a better experience for employees. But a centralized team familiar with all aspects of hiring has benefits beyond the human side of human resources; centralizing recruiting, in particular, has the greatest potential for saving time and money across your hiring landscape. Because sourcing lays much of the groundwork for the hiring process—not just on a single job search, but across multiple hiring needs, even across years—investing in centralizing your sourcing has the potential to save more of your recruitment budget by reducing haphazard spending.
Why Decentralization Doesn’t Really Work
Let’s first imagine the alternative: the de-centralized hiring process, which is handled through different departments Let’s first imagine the alternative: the de-centralized hiring process, which is handled through different departments throughout your organization. Essentially, this requires each department to reinvent the wheel each time they have a new hire. Is the sourcing based on a hunch, the hiring manager’s preference, or actual data that demonstrates the best source of hire? Over the course of the year, what will that sourcing look like in terms of quality, diversity, and the costs put in?
By centralizing the recruitment process, a core talent acquisition and talent management team can create an efficient process that achieves a similar level of quality for each new candidate search. It takes out the variables of a de-centralized process; a team familiar with the process and an organization’s multiple hiring needs can root out inefficiencies and can improve candidate experiences, ultimately leading to better quality candidates and better hires.
Centralization Means No Candidate Is Overlooked
Quality sourcing relies on a robust recruitment strategy, which requires the talent acquisition team to be able to view the bigger picture. For example, one source of excellent candidates for a new vacancy are those top tier candidates that didn’t make the cut for past job searches. The centralized recruitment team can make the connection between a newly open position that requires similar skillsets to past job vacancies. When this kind of decision-making is housed in different departments of your organization, these important connections won’t be made and the wealth of information already collected from past candidates that have already gone through the process will be underutilized.
Centralization + The Right Tech = Recruitment Success
Centralizing your sourcing is both about the hiring team familiar with the recruitment process, who can contribute more meaningfully to your organization’s talent management efforts, and also about the recruitment method that optimizes the efficiency of the hiring process. Centralized sourcing can take advantage of sophisticated technology that can optimize the efficiency of job advertising over time. Again, in terms of budget, cherry-picking ads through multiple job sites can lead to haphazard spending. Centralized sourcing, on the other hand, might take a broader approach.
For example, when you have a hiring team that deals with multiple job vacancies at once, it can take advantage of job ad technology that organizes multiple job ad campaigns to maximize the efficiency of the recruitment budget. An AI recruiting platform like PandoLogic can use historical data from job ad campaigns to target your best sources of hire based on job type. Further, this type of job ad tech can maximize your budget by using budget allocation algorithms that divide your campaign dollars in order to optimize each job ad’s performance. This kind of calculation can only work with a centralized recruiting budget.
A centralized hiring process with a core team and the right technology can help you find the best source of hire for each new vacancy and save you money.