A lack of talented candidates happens to the best of us. It happens to the brightest companies and the best recruiting teams. But if your company struggled through its most recent round of recruiting, it might be because your candidate sourcing is failing. There are lots of reasons that could be, but thankfully there are also plenty of ways to revitalize your sourcing as well.

Reprioritize Your Candidate Sourcing

If your candidate sourcing is failing you, you may need to reconsider where your priorities lie. How much money are you spending on your candidate sourcing? If your answer is “not much,” then that could be why your sourcing is failing. The first step in fixing your candidate sourcing is making it a priority.

Hiring is one of the most important parts of any business, and if you’re taking another look at the resources you’re dedicating to it, you’re not alone. In a recent survey, 46% of companies ranked “Recruiting/sourcing highly-skilled talent” as their number one priority, and 25% ranked “improving sourcing techniques” as their top recruiting priority. Companies are beginning to see how important sourcing is to finding great talent, and if you’re not thinking the same, you could fall behind, losing precious candidates along the way.

Companies are catching on to the importance of sourcing techniques. Read how to avoid these fails:

Bring it In(ternal)

If you’re truly dedicated to sourcing as part of your recruiting strategy, consider making your recruiting a more integral part of your business by bringing it in-house. Glassdoor, a company that knows a thing or two about candidates, deduced it needed to do exactly that last year. Steve Roop (@rooptroop), Vice President and General Manager at Glassdoor, breaks down why his company needed to make the change.

“…Glassdoor had relied on small number of contract recruiters and third party contingent search firms to assist the hiring managers. But given the constant hiring volume expected for 2014, we concluded that the best thing to do was bring on full-time recruiters for key job categories like Engineering, Sales, and G&A… We weren’t starting from scratch, but we had big, audacious goals and a huge amount of hiring to do each month. Thus, we had to build our foundation and deliver results to the hiring managers at the same time.”

@rooptroop GM with Glassdoor says they had to build a foundation to successfully recruit. Read more tips:

Bring in your recruiting (and sourcing) in-house, and it’ll be easier to develop a more cohesive candidate sourcing strategy that’s both effective and aligned with the brand.

Examine Your Sources of Sourcing

Now let’s talk about some information your (hopefully internal) recruiting team should consider when rebuilding your sourcing strategy. First, where should your team look to source their candidates? Here are the top sources of hires for companies over the last twelve months.

• 74% of companies said job boards were a significant source of hires in the past year.
• 64% of companies said company career websites were a significant source of hires over the last 12 months.
• 62% of companies said internal hires were a significant source of hires in the last year.
• 59% of companies said social professional networks were a significant source of hires for them last year.

After seeing stats like these, your recruiting team can then use their newfound resources to do some prioritizing of their own. Although many people heralded the decline of job boards when it comes to hires, companies are more reliant on them now than they’ve ever been, and your team would be wise to look into placing your jobs on job boards.

If your candidate sourcing has been failing you for a while now, these are only the first steps in building a new process that works. But with the right dedication to sourcing, a better idea of how you want your sourcing strategy to fit into your larger company’s vision, and some solid data on where you should look for hires, there’s little to stop you from turning it around. You’ll just need a bit of commitment.

If you need a candidate sourcing platform that will get you the best candidates instead of the leftovers, you need Broadbean. We’ll help you source the right hires for your company quickly and easily.