3 Common Recruiting Sources, Best Places to Recruit Employees and What to Know About Each

Best Employee Hiring Sources for Recruitment

When it comes to your talent acquisition, the common recruiting sources you use are the lifeline to finding and retaining the best talent available. If you leverage these sources of recruitment well, your company will have a strong applicant pool with talented individuals who will stay committed to the company once they’re hired. However, using poor recruiting sources will result in a lower quality of talent that will result in poor performance and higher attrition rates.

FurstPerson has identified three tiers of talent sources to recruit the best employees, as well as the important things to consider for each one. Following is a description of the tiers, the different types of forms these sources take, as well as the pros and cons of each one.

Tier 1: Traditional; Recruitment Sources: Newspapers, Job Fairs, Employment Agencies

Forms: Newspapers, job fairs, employment agencies

• Pros: Traditional forms of recruitment are frequently used external sources of recruitment because they are very easy to find and commonly accessed by job candidates, especially hourly workers like contact center or retail job searchers. Your talent pool won’t ever second guess checking the classifieds for a job ad or attending a job fair. Professional level job candidates, or people looking for salaried positions, may also check industry magazines that have a section for available jobs.
  
  
• Cons: These sources of recruitment have two major drawbacks: quality of candidate and lack of competitiveness compared to other forms of communication. FurstPerson has found that the quality of candidate found through these external sources of recruitment is often lower compared to other forms, leading to higher attrition rates and poor performance. Oftentimes, the candidates, hourly and salaried, using these forms are unemployed or struggle to maintain employment. Furthermore, as more modern forms of job searching become more prominent, the most qualified candidates are looking elsewhere – meaning your company isn’t targeting them by using the traditional tier of recruiting sources. All you are doing is mostly finding job candidates who are not a good fit, have employment issues or are not a quality of hire in other ways.

Tier 2: Internet Recruitment Sources: Online Job Boards, Company Website, Social Media

• Pros: The internet provides an unlimited reach to a large pool of candidates, making it one of the best places to recruit employees on a national or global basis. Posting a job ad on the internet means that candidates will be able to apply immediately, and recent studies have shown that candidates actively seek and apply to postings as close to the job’s publishing time as possible. What’s more, being able to post a job ad online means you can continually refresh the posting as needed, so applicants know they’re applying for a position that is still open, and not applying to a posting a week old that may already be in progress of getting filled.
  
  Using common recruiting sources on the internet ensures you are recruiting competitively in the open marketplace. This is especially important to effectively reaching a globalized labor pool.
  
  Developing a carefully constructed job posting is a crucial step in attracting the best job candidates. Careful construction means the job requirements and preferred job candidate experience are clearly described, using the correct language and keywords. Taking the time to develop a solid job posting, even for hourly workers, helps the organization avoid an influx of job applications from undesirable candidates. Failing to take the time to get the job description right is not justified by the fact it is often quick and simple to post available jobs on internet-based websites.

• Cons: With such a large applicant pool there is going to be a much higher volume of applicants than with the other two tiers, meaning more candidates to sift through with the potential of good candidates falling through the cracks and poor candidates getting interviews. It’s also much harder to gauge job candidate interest with an internet application – in other words, who’s applying because he/she wants to work at your organization in particular versus who’s applying because he/she wants work and doesn't care where. As the internet rapidly becomes one of the most common recruiting sources, it is important to recognize its limitations to avoid wasting organizational resources on evaluating a large pool of applicants who are not likely to get hired or should not get hired.

Tier 3: Person-to-Person Recruiting Sources: Employee Referral Programs, Walk in Applicants

• Pros: This form of recruitment often provides a much more secure, insightful look at a candidate because there’s some connection – either the candidate actively seeks out the company, or an employee within the company is referring the candidate in question and vouching for their credentials and work ethic. Looking for qualified job applicants by asking current employees for referrals is an ideal strategy to recruit the best employees. Referrals and walk-ins are the strongest candidates out of all other recruiting sources.
  
  
• Cons: These candidates are often harder to find, and aren’t as frequent. Depending on this tier as your primary source of recruiting will result in much smaller applicant pools. While leveraging this form of recruiting is recommended, it shouldn’t be the only source – using a hybrid approach of tier 2 and tier 3 will be more effective at helping your company recruit the best employees. Furthermore, making the most of this tier may mean adding a referral reward program for your employees, which can take a lot of work and planning if it’s not already in place.

Developing a hybrid recruiting approach that utilizes internal sources of recruitment and external sources of recruitment will ensure your organization is getting access to the most qualified job candidates. It is easy to waste a lot of money and staff time recruiting and interviewing the wrong candidates, only to end up hiring people who leave within a year. Organizations get complacent and keep on doing what they have always done in the recruitment arena, especially when filling positions in a department like a call center.

If you calculate the employee turnover rate, and it is high, then the common recruiting sources your organization is using could very well be one of the reasons. The people you recruit plays a big role in the quality of hire achieved. Attracting and hiring the right people will save your company money in several ways, especially by reducing the employee turnover rate and increasing workforce productivity.

To learn more about the talent acquisition process, read this blog post here. And, to understand how you can better prepare for this process, download this e-book on questions you should ask yourself before implementing a pre-hire assessment process.