Improving online recruiting

Emilie Jo Ipsen

Emilie Jo Ipsen

Nov 09, 2022

Recruiting

As unemployment drops across Europe and the US (in 2017) it becomes harder for employers in all industries to get the attention of qualified candidates when posting job advertisements. This is certainly also the case for many employers within the transport and logistics sector, and particularly for small and medium-sized companies without a well-known brand name. There are ways to get past this!

Sourcing

Sourcing in recruitment refers to the identification and uncovering of candidates through proactive recruiting methodologies. Talent sourcing strategies are formulated to fit a certain industry and targeted profiles so that the best candidates from both active and passive talent pools will be found. A successful talent-sourcing strategy needs several ingredients: dedicated sourcing resources, sourcing expertise and supporting technology.

Talent Sourcing Strategies

A professional talent sourcing strategy implies that all candidate channels online are searched for potential candidates. This means contacting and networking extensively with all appropriate profiles, to leverage professional and social networking sites and sources like LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook and Twitter. Searching these sites can be difficult so the knowledge of how to build the right search strings is essential.

Once the pipeline of candidates has been built they need to be contacted. This requires an email address, telephone number or the acceptance to connect on a network (social or professional). A dialogue is initiated to evaluate the interest of the candidate. Some of them will not be interested in a new position, some will not have the required skills and some will not respond. In our experience searching for transport, logistics and supply chain professionals you will on average need to identify and contact 100 potential candidates to close one position.

Pools of Candidates

Potential candidates can be split into two different pools. One with passive candidates who are not actively looking for a new job and the other with active candidates who are interested in making a move as soon as possible, either because they are unemployed, unsatisfied with their current job or for other personal reasons. The passive candidate pool is by far the biggest and most interesting pool of candidates and targeting this pool increases the likelihood of identifying more top talent who would never be found through traditional sources like job boards.

Transport Talent

At Transport Talent we have been working hard to build a professional recruitment and sourcing team. We have a clear process to support how we meet and exceed our client’s expectations. We are recruitment specialists and have invested in the right technology to make us, and thereby our clients’, resources as effective as possible.

Our best practices for online sourcing of candidates:

1. Analyse and understand the job opening requirements.

2. Use this understanding to intelligently select the right titles, skills, companies, responsibilities, industry terms, etc. to include in your Boolean search strings or whatever semantic search techniques you are using.

3. When you review the results of your initial search, make sure to scan the results for other relevant titles, search terms, companies etc. that you can incorporate into your next search.

4. Based on the intel and the results that you gain from each successive search, modify the search strings appropriately and run them again.

5. Repeat these steps until you have an acceptable volume of highly relevant results.

At Transport Talent we help our clients to fill their vacancies with our innovative recruitment and sourcing services. Contact us today for a non-binding talk to learn more about how we can help you!