Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Why Sourcing?
We've seen an interesting phenomenon in our field this year. While many companies are experiencing growth, they've held back on growing their recruiting organization. This seems the norm rather than the exception. They're willing to add revenue generating employees, but not administrative headcount. Apparently companies are none too confident in the economy. As a result, many recruiters have too many openings to be effective. And so, even with access to sourcing tools, they haven't the time to use them.
Sourcing is the first step to filling a position. Active sourcing - looking for a candidate (as opposed to running an ad), is time consuming. When recruiters don't have time to do the initial effort required to fill a position, things back up further. So they outsource searches to contract recruiters and search firms.
An alternative to this very expensive tradition is to outsource just the sourcing component of the hiring process. Why not hire a research team to dig up leads? And a telemarketing staff to screen them? Its cheaper than hiring an executive search firm, or even a contract recruiter. If corporate recruiters were fed pre-screened candidates and their sole responsibility was to complete the remainder of the hiring process, how productive could they become? At least they'd be focused on the higher value-adds in the process, focusing on qualified candidates and hiring managers instead of sifting through resume dbases.
Now, what if those researchers and telemarketers were based in India? What would that do to the economics of recruiting? Why don't search firms outsource research this way? Think what their margins would be. They're already high.
Its the kind of thing companies come up with all the time in their core business. Why not in HR?
Sourcing is the first step to filling a position. Active sourcing - looking for a candidate (as opposed to running an ad), is time consuming. When recruiters don't have time to do the initial effort required to fill a position, things back up further. So they outsource searches to contract recruiters and search firms.
An alternative to this very expensive tradition is to outsource just the sourcing component of the hiring process. Why not hire a research team to dig up leads? And a telemarketing staff to screen them? Its cheaper than hiring an executive search firm, or even a contract recruiter. If corporate recruiters were fed pre-screened candidates and their sole responsibility was to complete the remainder of the hiring process, how productive could they become? At least they'd be focused on the higher value-adds in the process, focusing on qualified candidates and hiring managers instead of sifting through resume dbases.
Now, what if those researchers and telemarketers were based in India? What would that do to the economics of recruiting? Why don't search firms outsource research this way? Think what their margins would be. They're already high.
Its the kind of thing companies come up with all the time in their core business. Why not in HR?
