What talent sourcing is
Talent sourcing (البحث عن المرشحين), also called candidate sourcing, is identifying potential candidates and reaching them before they apply, instead of waiting for whoever arrives through the job advertisement.
The weight of the definition falls on the word “before”. In talent sourcing, the organisation moves first: it identifies the people who could fill a role and makes contact with them at a point when they have not applied for it. With a job advertisement, the order is reversed. The organisation publishes the role, and the candidates it considers are the people who saw the advertisement and chose to respond.
Why a job advertisement is not enough without talent sourcing
A job advertisement reaches people who are looking for work now. Someone who is content in their current position does not browse job advertisements, and that person may be the right candidate.
The limit lies in who sees the advertisement. An advertisement is seen by those who go looking for vacancies, and a person who is satisfied where they are does not go looking. The description of the role, however it is written, does not reach someone who never browses the listings in which it appears.
Talent sourcing addresses that gap by going to the candidate instead of waiting for the candidate to come. For that reason it is used for roles in which the required capability is scarce, or in which the vacancy costs more the longer it stays open.
Where talent sourcing finds candidates
Talent sourcing draws on four sources of candidates:
- The pool of past applicants, which can be the least costly of the four, and which includes people who applied a year earlier and were nearly accepted.
- Employee referral, which draws on the network of relationships held by the team as a whole.
- Professional networks and specialist communities.
- Former employees who left a good record behind them, a source that can be overlooked out of habit rather than by decision.
The pool of past applicants is made up of people who have already been in contact with the organisation by applying to it. Their records are of the kind a candidate database keeps, the organised store of records on people who have applied to an organisation or whom it has contacted. Among them is the person who applied a year earlier and came close to being accepted. That person is already known to the organisation and has already been assessed once.
Employee referral works through the people already on the team. Each employee knows people outside the organisation, and taken together those relationships form a network wider than the contacts of any single employee. A referral is a route into that network: an employee puts forward someone they know, and the organisation reaches a candidate it had not identified.
Professional networks and specialist communities gather people by their field of work. They are where people who share a profession or a specialism meet, which makes them a place to identify potential candidates by the work they do.
Former employees who left a good record behind them are people whose work the organisation has already seen. Where this source goes unused, the reason can be habit and not a decision: the organisation has not chosen to exclude people who left, but it has not formed the practice of looking at them when it searches for candidates.
How talent sourcing differs from recruitment
Talent sourcing is the first step in recruitment, not another word for it. Its part ends once there is an interested candidate, and screening, interviews, selection and the offer then begin.
The distinction lies in where talent sourcing stops. Its output is a candidate who has been identified and reached, and who is interested in the role. What happens after that point, deciding whether the candidate is suitable, interviewing them, choosing between candidates and making an offer, belongs to the later stages of recruitment, not to talent sourcing.
Confusing the two produces the wrong measurement. The person doing the sourcing is held to account for the number of hires, although the decision to hire is not theirs to make.
The number of hires depends on every stage of recruitment, and the decisions in the later stages are taken after the sourcer’s part has ended: who passes screening, who performs well at interview, who is selected and who accepts the offer. Holding the sourcer to account for hires measures them on an outcome decided at stages they do not control.
How talent sourcing is measured
The indicators suited to talent sourcing concern what it controls:
- The number of qualified candidates who came through it.
- The response rate, the share of people contacted who replied to the first contact.
- The share who went on to the first interview among the candidates it produced.
The first indicator counts candidates, but only those who are qualified, so a long list of names that do not suit the role does not raise it. The second indicator turns on the first contact, the moment at which the organisation reaches a person who has not applied. The third follows the candidates produced by talent sourcing to the first interview, the point at which the later stages of recruitment take them over.
Cost per hire and the time taken to fill a vacancy, measured as time to fill, are different. They are indicators that talent sourcing shares with the other stages of recruitment.
Cost per hire is the average an organisation spends to fill one position, and time to fill is the number of days from opening a requisition for a role until it is filled. Each of them covers the whole of recruitment and not one stage of it, so neither describes talent sourcing alone.
What undermines talent sourcing
A standard first message sent to a hundred people is received as a message sent to a hundred people. Fewer people reply, and the low response is then taken as evidence that candidates are scarce.
Two things happen in that sequence. The first is in the message: a text written for a hundred people at once reaches each of them as a message written for no one in particular, and fewer of them reply. The second is in how the result is interpreted: the low number of replies is taken as a fact about the market, that suitable candidates are hard to find, when it came from the way the message was written.
The alternative is not necessarily more effort on every message. It is narrowing the list first, until personalising each message becomes possible.
Built in parallel with talent sourcing is employer branding (العلامة التجارية لصاحب العمل), because a person who receives the message looks into the organisation before replying.
This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.
A standalone Saudi HR system
One employee file holding the contract, the documents and their expiry dates, the attendance record, leave, salary and end-of-service entitlements. End-of-service, overtime and leave-balance calculations are built into the system.
A standalone system on its own subscription. The connection to Qoyod Accounting is now available.