by Katerina Santikou, Managing Director | Workathlon
If your applications trend is not going up right now you are not doing something right.
It’s October and the season is over for most candidates. The frenzy of “where do I go next” year has already started. If your career page view isn’t upward trending like the one below, you need to take action now.
We will dive into the first stage of every recruiting funnel, which is candidate sourcing. To explain this better, candidate sourcing is the process of searching for, identifying and contacting potential candidates for roles you are either recruiting for or will be recruiting for in the future. LinkedIn reports 90% of people are open to learning more about new opportunities, but only 36% of candidates are actively searching for a new job.
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With the war on talent being quite fierce, continuous sourcing is a must in the hospitality industry. So much, that over 80% of companies currently source proactively. This is exactly why we are sharing this article, to provide you with the right tips for you to improve your sourcing techniques!
PLAN, PLAN, PLAN
For most hotels, the season is slowing down, giving most the opportunity apart from doing performance reviews and exit interviews, to start planning for the next season. Companies are already interviewing managerial staff for the following season and sending offer letters. So get your organizational chart out, discuss with senior management what worked and what didn’t work and start creating your open positions. The first step is to clearly define the job position, its requirements and skillset and analyse what didn’t go well with the existing employee in order to avoid the same mistakes.
After you have a clearly defined position, create your candidate persona. Candidate personas are created by defining the characteristics, skills, and traits that make up your perfect hire, you can use this as a benchmark when sourcing potential candidates. Meet Hotel Manager George, Workathlon’s persona for a specific position:
This persona would be the ideal candidate, however make sure that your specifications are idealistic and that there is a strong talent pool for candidates with these characteristics. A way to do that would be to login to your Workathlon account, go to the talent pool and do a dynamic search with certain of the characteristics above. If the results you are getting are not enough, try relaxing some of the requirements in order to get a better volume of candidates.
HAVE DIVERSE SOURCING CHANNELS
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In order to get both quantity and quality of candidates, you need to have effective and diverse channels that would feed your funnel. For example, when using Workathlon we don’t just keep your job post on our site; we will post it on social media, groups, run google ads on the job, post in other job portals and aggregators (ex. Indeed, Neuvoo). If you are not using a platform that will spread the job posting around, then you need to do it yourself. Don’t expect from a single source to get both quantity and quality candidates; diversification is as important on sourcing as it is on the sales of a hotel.
But before you post have you checked the talent pool you already have from previous job postings and also from your current employees? Advertise internally the job posting (referrals have the highest success rate in hiring) and re-engage previous candidates. An applicant tracking system where you can view again candidates from previous job openings is crucial for this.
Sourcing channels don’t need to be just online channels. Going offline and meeting people face-to-face at events is a great way to source new candidates. Attend a job fair and meet candidates face-to-face. There will be less competition to stand out as an employer, and candidates will be more likely to respond to your follow-up messages after they’ve had a conversation with you in person.
More to come
Are we finished? Of course not! The candidate experience you offer, the employer branding you possess and the final measurement of your efforts are also important to the sourcing of your valuable colleagues. Stay tuned for the complete Guide coming up at Workathlon!
To sum up, your company does not need to embrace all techniques, but you need to test what works better for your organization. Just figure out what sourcing strategy works for you early on, measure it and see where you can improve to get even better results. But remember this: a sourcing strategy in recruitment is only as good as the last employee who was hired.
