Some of the easily forgotten candidate sourcing tips

It is so often the easiest and simplest candidate sourcing advice that is most rapidly forgotten. People forget about some of the basics of successful online recruitment – such as the importance of thorough research across all platforms – in favour of bringing in someone with ambition and a twinkle in their eye, but an ultimately ill-matching set of skills and experiences. 

Services like those of webrecruit (http://www.webrecruit.co.uk), encompassing the likes of the proactive searching of CV databases, strategic LinkedIn headhunting and additional candidate management, aim to ward off costly recruitment mistakes. However, it is frequently the very start of the staff recruitment process that sees the biggest errors being committed, with a poorly defined job description and person specification failing to attract the right person.

Even when the same role title is consistently used across many organisations, there is no guarantee that the responsibilities of that role will be the same time after time, and if you are interested in modelling a new role on an existing one in another company, it does need to be adjusted to your own company’s requirements.

There may even be a completely different job title that is a more appropriate match, or you may find that there is plenty of overlap in responsibilities with an existing role in the company – to such an extent that the best candidate can be quickly sourced from within and the whole formal recruitment process avoided. The employer needs to repeatedly ask itself what its requirements are from a particular position, never making assumptions when recruiting staff. 

One reason for this thorough research into the position from the outset is that it makes all subsequent work easier. Strategic candidate sifting is often vital, for example, given the database of potential candidates with which you are likely to be presented, with varying levels of match to the criteria. If you fail to do your research before you begin to recruit staff, then you won’t know how to narrow down the list, whereas better-prepared firms will know which qualifications and industry certifications they can afford to make non-negotiable.

Even before you look online for candidates, you may have the CVs of many potential candidates on record, so it only makes economic and practical sense to call them up to ask of their possible interest in the new position, rather than tearing up all of that past work. They may, or may not be actively looking, but may nonetheless be attracted to the opportunity. It could be the case, for example, that they are approaching the end of a short-term contract.

Once you have done this, there are many creative ways of searching further, both on more obvious online job portals and those that require a greater leap of faith, such as Facebook or industry message boards. By no means is this list of tips an exhaustive one for those looking for candidates, but it can at least be invaluable when beginning that relationship with recruitment experts like those of webrecruit (http://www.webrecruit.co.uk).