It’s predicted that in 2023, worker demand will continue to outpace supply and companies will struggle to find talent. Posting positions on job boards and social media can be time-consuming and less than ideal when a position needs to be filled immediately. To win out over their competitors, more companies are looking to direct sourcing to accelerate their recruitment process. In fact, 39 percent of organizations that use contingent workers already rely on direct sourcing, and 23 percent plan to implement it in the future.

Direct sourcing versus traditional staffing

Direct sourcing is a service line that fills the gap between Managed Service Programs (MSP) and Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) programs. Direct sourcing varies from traditional staffing—where talent is sourced by multiple staffing suppliers—in three primary ways:

1. Leverages your employer brand: Your company’s brand is your reputation and how your culture and values are perceived. Direct sourcing uses your organization’s brand and employee value proposition (EVP) to attract candidates.
2. Proactive vs. reactive: Traditional staffing agencies do not begin sourcing, attracting, or engaging candidates until they receive a job requisition to fill an open position. Direct sourcing is more proactive in that hiring managers forecast future contingent labor needs and then utilize technology to source and pre-qualify workers before requisitions are received.
3. Curates a talent pool/community: Direct sourcing builds and curates a private talent pool for your organization that is vetted and active for specific locations, job functions, and/or titles. A strong talent curation process creates a solid foundation for a direct sourcing program.

Related: Webinar Recap: Enabling Total Talent Acquisition With Direct Sourcing

Related: The Top Reasons Direct Sourcing Programs Fail

What is talent curation?

If you look up the word curation in the dictionary, you will find that the definition centers around selecting, organizing, and bringing people and groups together. In direct sourcing, a talent curator(s)—typically a recruiter—finds and gathers prospective candidates into a talent community or pool and then continues to engage with them to keep their interest peeked until a position becomes open within the organization.

How is a talent pool curated?  

An organization’s talent pool is curated in two ways:

1. Artificial intelligence (AI) matching

Direct sourcing artificial intelligence (AI) technology platforms leverage a combination of candidate sources, including a company’s applicant tracking system (ATS), job boards, referral networks, LinkedIn, and social media. The AI technology creates vetted and active talent pools for specific job functions, titles, and/or geographic locations. To promote further optimization of this talent pool, talent curators organize the data and candidates based on experience, qualifications, and skills.

2. Accessing your organization’s candidate pool

• Alumni workers: An easy-to-access alternative talent source is the pool of your organization’s alumni employees—those workers who previously held positions at your company and ended their assignments in good standing. A talent curation team can build a proprietary database with specific populations of alumni workers, and candidates can be sourced from this pool before extending the search to the staffing supplier base.
• Silver medalists: Otherwise known as candidates that came in second in the interview process, silver medalists can also provide a viable talent source to leverage. Talent curators compile these resources into candidate pools that can be tapped into continually.

Benefits of talent curation

Talent curation benefits both the hiring company and the candidate. Because your organization has a pre-qualified candidate pool, talent curation provides value to the hiring process by filling a position as soon as it opens. Therefore your time to fill is reduced, and candidate quality is improved. Candidates benefit from a more highly personalized, consistent, and exceptional experience.

A study conducted by LiveHire—a leading global recruitment and direct sourcing platform—found that proactively curating and pooling candidates generates better results than traditional job advertising:

• 41% reduction in applications to process per hire
• 24% improvement in submittal-to-hire ratios
• 30% reduction in shortlisted candidates withdrawing per hire
• 31% reduction in time to submit

Accessing your organization’s candidate pool also offers lower markup rates relative to candidates sourced by staffing suppliers, providing cost savings.

Are you a right fit for a direct sourcing program?

Direct sourcing solutions provide an alternative way to ensure greater success in talent curation and pipelining. If you still have questions about direct sourcing and talent curation or are ready to talk about direct sourcing services for your business, contact us!

This blog was written by Broadleaf’s Vice President of Client Delivery Joseph O’Shea.