Talent lead generation and sourcing

The last section on data takes us neatly to lead generation. In this section we aim to get you thinking about three things: How are people entering your funnel, where are they coming from, and are they the right people for you?

The ‘quality of hire’ and ‘source channel effectiveness’ metrics give you a good retrospective look at the success of your funnel. The latter metric, in particular, helps you to examine which sourcing channels have brought in the best candidates. Was it LinkedIn, Indeed, Seek, your website, or some other channel?

Regardless, you need to look at your inputs as well as your outputs. Are you following best practice to ensure the best people are finding you? Are you getting sufficiently out there, and creating awareness for your brand? Consider the following:

4.1. Review all job advertisements/descriptions

1. Are your job descriptions interesting and compelling?
2. Are the job titles accurate?
3. Are your perks/culture strengths easily visible?
4. Do you disclose salary ranges?
5. Are your ads the right length (no more than 600 words?)
6. Do you segment your ads using bolded subheadings (e.g. location, what you’ll do, key skills, etc?)
7. Do you use Easy Apply? Can you?

4.2. Refine your outreach programs

1. Consider using specialized job boards. Most industries, like marketing or sales, have community job boards, but more general examples include Monster, Dice, CareerBuilder, and Ladders.
2. Join Slack communities like Hacking HR, HRtoHR, People Geeks, PeoplePeople, Culture Corner.
3. Work with major universities and colleges to join their graduate hiring programs.

4.3. Long-term head hunting/nurturing

1. First, identify your approach for going after and nurturing top talent, even when said talent is not looking for a new opportunity.
2. Have your people leaders seek to find and cultivate relationships with peers in their respective spaces/industries.
3. Generate a hit list of ideal candidates that you can reach out to with cold campaigns, next time you’re looking either to fill a special role, or create a new one.

4.4. Review your events strategy

1. Are you holding recruiting events, either in-person or virtually? Check out Amazon’s Career Day and Spotify’s Diversify event for inspiration, but you needn’t be so grand – check out this guide from Workable to get started.

4.5. Review your analytics

Once you’ve implemented any (or all) of the ideas above, it’s a good idea to see how they’re tracking. Have they improved your quality of hire, or resulted in more candidates that fit your roles and your culture? Are there any places, or steps, that are causing people to bail out of your funnel?