5 Tips for a Successful Sourcing Strategy

Every talent-sourcing strategy is unique. Especially so for high-growth startups.
It will vary according to your startup size, goals, stage, tools, and processes in place. Here are a few ways you can start searching for candidates if you’re recruiting directly yourself as a founder or have a 1-person HR department.

1. Employee referrals

Use an employee referral program as a recruitment tool to encourage current staff members to recommend friends, acquaintances, and ex-colleagues to you. An effective employee referral program is usually the quickest and most affordable approach to finding talent.

Keep in mind: internal referrals can be a mixed blessing since you risk being biased or feeling pressured to choose a candidate who doesn’t fit your criteria for hiring.
Employer recommendation schemes should go alongside a carefully thought-out recruiting process that enables you to objectively evaluate candidates’ talents to reduce the likelihood of making poor hiring selections.

Creating a basic interview assessment matrix always helps to stay more objective – if you’re looking for a template to use, download one from our Resources tab.

2. Leverage LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become the number 1 platform for professional networking, insights, and recruitment.

Why does it work 90% of the time for sourcing and building a candidate pipeline?
It’s low-budget (kind of). It’s user-friendly (mostly). It gives you access to a large pool of potential candidates.

According to LinkedIn, 70% of its members are “passive candidates”, meaning they’re not actively looking for a career change, they aren’t applying for vacancies, but a large majority (especially post-pandemic) are open to hearing about the right role (the key here is the right role).

While LinkedIn is great, it is also one of the most time-consuming sourcing tactics: we would highly recommend learning more about Boolean search and how to use relevant tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter (whether the latter is worth the investment for a founder or 1-person HR department, that’s another topic we will discuss in our next blog).

3. Job boards

There are more than 50.000 online job boards: think about that for a second. How can you go about selecting the most effective website that is worth the investment, and brings a high return on investment?

Within the Polyglot resources, we have our own selection of top global & niche job boards, which we have put together after trial and error.

This is what you can do to figure out which platform can work for you:

• What your budget is. And I mean how much can you actually pay for a job posting which will potentially save you £££ on future recruitment costs?
• What the niche of your role is & which job board offers that niche (e.g. if it’s a software development role, it’s best to post it on a website offering jobs for a specific language or framework).
• Once you’ve made a list of top 5-10 job boards, research each one to find out how many monthly users and applicants they have. Read their ratings & check out testimonials.
• Don’t be afraid to contact the website to ask for discounts, deals, and trials!

4. Social Media

Finding talent on social media doesn’t just mean tweeting about it, posting an Instagram story, or shoutout to your network on LinkedIn (although this does work at times!).

Social Media talent search is also about having an optimised career page, company page, and social media careers content: in other words, digital employer branding.

Think outside of the box here & be honest: highlight what you truly believe would be attractive to potential candidates- post Q&As, photos, and videos showcasing company culture, a day in the life of a particular role.

Use your employer’s voice to attract the candidates you’d actually want in your team!

5. Talent acquisition experts & recruiters

In this day and age, there are hundreds of tools at your disposal to find, contact, and attract the right candidates.

But I know as well as you do, as a founder or only-HR Manager at a startup, you’re feeling overwhelmed most of the time with your to-do lists and occasionally find yourself out of depth, because how can we be a pro at everything?

Once you’ve finally accepted that some tasks can and should be delegated, and you can save time & money exponentially if it’s delegated to the right expert, that’s where talent consultants or recruiters come in.

Think about partnering with niche recruiters or C-level talent headhunters to identify, attract & recruit top executives and go-to-market roles for your startup’s success.

Just like choosing the right job board, applicant tracking software, or any other tool, a recruiter or a recruitment company needs to be thoroughly vetted. Ask for testimonials, case studies, questions about what worked out & what didn’t, and what they learned from previous experiences.

Agree on set processes and timelines with them & keep in mind the best founder-recruiter relationship is a partnership.

At Polyglot, we work as partners with our clients, giving you an all-access client updates board, making sure we are continuously aligned and problem-solve even before problems arise. This is how we have placed winning candidates as Data Analysts, ML Engineers, Data Scientists, Product Managers, and more.

Hiring for Product or Data roles and looking to speak to expert recruiters in this domain? Let’s chat.