Daniel Miller 
Recruiters often search for the perfect applicant tracking system (ATS) that will help them find the right candidates with the right automation to fill their job positions. However, even with the advanced capabilities of ATS and CRM systems, human skills are still required to manage the sourcing process.
Here are some sourcing techniques and ideas that can make your search more efficient and effective.
Junior Recruiters Need Training
Sourcing is not an entry-level responsibility. It requires someone who can understand a job description and break it down into keywords that are searchable within someone’s experience or resume. This is where strong Boolean strings are created. To ensure that junior recruiters can effectively search for candidates, it’s important to provide training on industry knowledge, spotting candidates, and being flexible in adding them to a list.
Creating the Boolean Strings
Targeting a focused string of keywords that are alternatives to the job requirements ensures a limited number of potential qualified candidates. For instance, if you are searching for an eCommerce Digital Marketing Manager specialized in social media and paid search, you can create a search string like this:
(“Digital Marketing Manager” OR “Digital strategy manager” OR “digital manager” OR “ecommerce marketing manager”) AND (eCommerce OR “Competitor 1” OR “Competitor 2” OR “competitor 3”) AND (“social media” OR “paid social”) AND (“paid search” OR PPC)
This search string above allows you to find multiple title variations within a certain industry and to ensure you hit up that industry, you are also finding those that have that industry name or a competitor name on the profile. You are also requiring that certain digital marketing channels are spoken about on the profile by adding social media and paid search keywords.
Research on the Daily
Seasoned recruiters institute research into their daily routine. While an ATS can help with sourcing, it’s important to search both your internal ATS and external resources such as LinkedIn. For executive-level searches, LinkedIn inmails can be great, but they should be strategic and talk to the candidate you are reaching out to. A long list of job requirements will not entice a passively seeking candidate.
Hiring External Sourcing Teams, Internal Sourcers, and Using AI to Find Candidates
Hiring outsourced teams is a great way to build lists of target candidates when you are looking to hire. Make sure the teams you hire have their own resources, such as premium subscriptions to ZoomInfo, premium job board sites like CareerBuilder, recruiter access within LinkedIn, and so on. Once you have a team sourcing for you, think of list building tactics, outreach, and a content marketing approach, since a volume of candidates can flood into the database quickly.
New ATS systems such as RecruiterPM can help build up your candidate database by partnering with job boards that allow you to import resumes that match a certain job and build candidate lists for positions that you might not normally search for or harder to search roles. The best applicant tracking systems create partnerships and API’s with providers so a recruiter does not have to leave their system but has easy access to tools that can help them fill roles faster.
When considering ATS platforms, it’s important to look for AI features that can make the sourcing life of recruiters easier.
Some features to consider include:
- Job Description Matching to Candidates: This feature enables candidates to be matched, sorted and ranked based on the criteria you’re searching for, which helps to cut down on the time needed to search for candidates.
- Candidate to Candidate Match: This feature enables recruiters to easily find similar candidates once they’ve found one that they like.
- Programmatic Job Advertising & Posting: This feature allows recruiters to have their job descriptions posted on the best job boards to attract the most qualified candidates for their open roles. An algorithm and marketing ad technology are used to find the best job boards and promote the job opening on those sites.
ChatGPT & Recruiting, its a whole new world in 2023:
Well it is quite easy to create Boolean strings now within ChatGPT.Watch this. Say you need to find PHP Developers but you are not sure what to call them.
Go to https://chat.openai.com/chat
Ask the chat engine: What are alternative titles to PHP Developer and PHP Engineer and build a Boolean string for it.
And here was the chatGPT response:
Here’s a boolean string that includes some of these alternative titles:
(“php developer” OR “php engineer” OR “web developer” OR “full stack developer” OR “software engineer” OR “back-end developer” OR “server-side developer” OR “application developer” OR “database developer” OR “php programmer” OR “php architect” OR “php consultant”) AND (“experience” OR “job” OR “resume” OR “CV” OR “openings” OR “hiring”)
So there you have it, a fantastic new way to help you build your Boolean strings if you should need…Ah, the wonders of technology! You can even ask the ChatGPT engine to create a job description for a certain role or help you with creating a message for contacting a candidate. I dont suggest using all the copy, but it can help you give you an idea of what to write as you starting to create job postings and email campaigns.
To conclude, it is imperative to stay creative and continuously find new ways to bring in candidates. The best recruiters and talent acquisition professionals are constantly bringing innovation and efficiency to the sourcing process and hopefully, the ideas above can help kick-start you into a new world of sourcing strategy.
