Are you missing a trick or two when it comes to candidate sourcing?

Most companies are under no illusions as to how vital successful staff recruitment is to their fortunes – but which is the most important element of staff recruitment itself? That would, of course, be candidate identification. After all, you can’t network with, build a relationship with or hire someone who you aren’t even aware of in the first place. Here, webrecruit (http://www.webrecruit.co.uk) investigates some of the candidate sourcing tips and tricks that you might have thus far overlooked.

First of all, that the Internet has unquestionably made it easier to find information on candidates and CVs does not give you an excuse to relent in your research into online recruitment. Far too many companies, after all, simply perform the most generic Google searches, using the same old, tired keywords that everybody else is using – and as a result, missing out on those potential ‘diamonds in the rough’.

Rather than make any old search, collect some names and start making calls, you should review the results for relevance to your vacancy, perhaps experimenting further with various search terms... and of course, that isn’t possible unless you think and research in advance.

It means that you should make sure that you fully understand the requirements of the post to be advertised, use that understanding to intelligently select titles, skills and responsibilities and use your searches to find new relevant keywords to incorporate into future searches.

Also vital to the process of recruiting staff is appreciating the imperfect nature of CVs. So many hiring managers will exclude a candidate on the basis of certain missing skills and experience that they actually do possess, but have simply forgotten to include on their CV. Particularly if there is a more obscure skill that you are looking for, you may find that calling someone with a generally relevant CV leads to such a discovery.

Also remember that every source of candidates, and not just LinkedIn, allows you to make connections between different advertised CVs. The person whose CV you are presently viewing may not seem quite the perfect match, but they may be connected to someone who is. It’s also possible that they actually are a great match in the context of your longer-term business goals, despite seeming slightly under-qualified or over-qualified right now.

It’s all too easy to presume that there aren’t any good people for your vacancy when trying to recruit staff, when the reality is that your search strategy isn’t quite good enough. Being snobby about any part of the online recruitment landscape – like online job boards – can result in you missing out on high quality candidates, and nor are the most recently posted CVs necessarily connected to the most active job-seekers. Some people will merely post their CV one day to ‘see what’s out there’.

Get in touch with the recruitment experts at webrecruit (http://www.webrecruit.co.uk) now for services that allow you to extract the maximum potential from your candidate sourcing.