High Volume Sourcing Success

For anyone who’s had the distinct pleasure of sourcing for high volume industries such as manufacturing, call centers, or retail, they know it’s an entirely different game. Sourcing has to be done efficiently as positions needing to be filled in the hundreds (or even thousands.) So the battle between quality and quantity begins.

Automate, Automate, Automate!

Any time savings, even if it’s mere seconds per application or applicant, can add up to hundreds of working hours when multiplied by volume. The less time spent on menial tasks, the more energy you can put into screening for the right fit. Here are a couple of ways to automate or enhance your process:

  • Mobile Career Sites: If you’re stuck in a time warp it’s time for you to join the rest of the world. Having a clean mobile site to capture applicants or prospects will save hours of paper shuffling alone.
  • Social Sourcing: Up your social media game. With Facebook jobs hitting the market sourcers now have the ability to reach massive markets faster than ever.
  • Chatbots: Setting up a chatbot which can answer fundamental questions regarding open positions is an excellent way to reduce email clutter while being fully responsive to the candidate.  
  • Video Prescreens: These pre-screen technologies have come a long way, as they now have artificial intelligence components which can rank the responses for you based on preset metrics.  

Event Marketing

If you are local to the geographical hiring area, it’s time to throw open the doors and pull people in. Advertise with local media outlets that your organization is hosting a massive hiring drive, and invite people to come in to learn more. By doing this, you will significantly reduce the number of candidates fall out due to not understanding the opportunity. To make this efficient be armed and ready with applicant capture tools such as apply on-site stations, or alternatives such as text to apply for numbers. If this is your first time doing this can be daunting, but keep a cool head and don’t be afraid to ask for help from other site management.

Rocking Referrals

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Having a rocking referral program is an easy way to keep your candidate pool fresh. Referrals by nature yield better hires and can be the best way to tap a population for a particular skill set. Developing and engaging your current workforce is crucial, as is asking for referrals during the screening process. Networking is often the only way to fill multiple openings of the same role.

Your SourceCon editor, Shannon Pritchett, once stated she filled over 100 hourly positions in a call center by offering a piece of candy for each referral. She called and screened each candidate that was referred. This is an example of a low-cost solution with an extremely successful result.

Relationships with Community Partners

Making friends in the community is a no brainer for natural networkers. If you’re working onsite, get out of the office and shake the hands of local community job readiness program leaders or various skill guilds. If you are working remotely, you’ll need to put in some well-placed phone calls to develop relationships. Once you are established as a reputable employer, many will jump at the opportunity to build relationships, as they are often measured on their ability to place their clients into positions.

Phil Hendrickson, former Chief Talent Strategist at Qwalify, is an industry recognized expert in the field of talent acquisition. He brings decades of experience helping companies solve a broad range of challenges, ranging from millennial recruiting, talent pipelining, recruiter training, diversity strategies, employer brand, talent engagement, veterans initiatives, mobile recruiting, social media, talent retention and systems integrations.

Having worked inside companies across a broad range of industries, from professional services, financial services and retail Phil understands how to navigate across teams and lead projects successfully. Several examples include: at Apple, doubling the Americas recruiting team to accommodate record store openings, consolidating a global CRM and beginning a veterans’ initiative. At Starbucks, he helped to: launch their veterans’ initiative, mobile recruiting, begin Starbucks jobs on Twitter and rolling out the first hourly ATS across 9,000 stores.

Phil has a passion for the retail industry and for helping recruiting teams overcome seasonal talent shortages, reduce turnover and other retail specific recruiting challenges. At both Starbucks and Apple Phil has perfected strategies for recruiting for culture fit.

Phil has been interviewed in Forbes, WSJ, CIO Insights and the Canadian Retailer Magazine. He supports local and national recruiting organizations and sits on the board of Northwest Recruiters Association, The LinkedIn 100, US Avature Advisory Council, a founding Advisory Council member for GettingHired a portal for people with disabilities and he was on LinkedIn’s Talent Brand Hall of Fame.

Phil began his recruiting career at a small boutique search firm in Lexington MA, and soon joined larger executive search firms before deciding to go into corporate recruiting. He has spent his corporate career at Sapient, Fannie Mae, Starbucks, Apple Retail, Qwalify and now Proactive Talent Strategies.

Prior to his career in talent acquisition he was an artist in Los Angeles, a painter, sculptor and a glass blower who traveled to Italy many times. Putting himself through school at UCLA Phil was a furniture mover living in Santa Monica while also working as an apartment manager, handyman and gardener for an apartment building near the ocean. In LA he also worked in Hollywood doing production work as a grip on TV commercials and music videos.

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