How to Source Candidates in Building Materials
Whether you need a salesperson (or any person) now, or if you need them in three months, six months, or you might hire one again, naturally you have got to be adept at sourcing.
Whether it’s a plant manager or an operations manager, an engineer, it doesn’t matter the role. It really applies to any kind of talent that you’re consistently bringing into your company.
Your Candidates Aren’t MIA!
Just know that they are out there, your talent is out there. They’re not always on the job boards, though. So it really becomes a struggle for a lot of companies when their only method of getting out into the market is to use job boards, job postings, and, and advertising. It doesn’t always work because candidates aren’t always applying for jobs.
In fact, WorkItDaily writes, “Job boards have a 2-4% effectiveness rate, whereas networking has over a 50% effectiveness rate.”
Traditional Sourcing Methods
In the traditional methods, you have the job boards or where you were basically just putting up an ad at indeed on ZipRecruiter, on LinkedIn and, and hoping that the right person applies. And it does work a lot of the time.
If you really want to make a informed decision, if you want to take a lot of risk out of the process, if you want to have multiple options on the table, you need to make sure that you’re seeing as much of the market as possible, so you have as many opportunities as possible.
Not everybody’s applying on job boards. The same goes for the resume databases that are under the exact same science. Not everybody is putting their resume on LinkedIn or Indeed or ZipRecruiter.
Other traditional methods are the corporate postings. you put them on your corporate website. You could ask for referrals from your employees. Some companies work with the chamber of commerce or local newspapers and magazines to advertise their position.
Modern Sourcing Methods
More modern methods are going to be focused around effectively marketing. We want to not only use lead databases to create directories for the employees that you’re recruiting. You want to make sure that you know who all is in that local market. You want to get their email and contact information.
You also want to consider setting up what is considered an omnipresent digital marketing strategy where not only are you continually staying in front of the candidate list you do have, but also getting in front of prospective candidates or people that have not yet displayed an interest. You need to make sure that you’re giving them an opportunity to learn more about your company and what the benefits of joining it would be for their career.
Tracking Info is Key
Naturally, you’re going to want to track everything. So if you don’t have an applicant tracking system, the easiest way to do this is just an Excel workbook. Set up a different sheet for each role, each location, and build that out over time. You want to make sure that you’re keeping accurate information in there, not only the contact information, the, where they are, what their title is, but also notes from each conversation.
If you’ve had full on screens, you want to include a lot of critical information for that candidate to make sure that you take it away later on you should consistently be expanding the list.
Learn About the Market
You want to know if company A has five salespeople that are working over there that are selling to your exact customers. You want to know all five of those people. You don’t want to just give up after meeting one or two. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t meet the other people, they’re there. They’re interacting with your customers. They’re using your products. You want to make sure that you hit least have some type of communication lane with this.
When you’re ready to contact your key associates directly, check out our article on Managing Initial Communication
So that’s a standard sourcing strategy for you. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at james@legacysearch.net. I look forward to getting introduced.
