You’ve done everything you have to. You’ve posted the job description on the right job boards and now all you have to do is wait for the right people to apply. That might have been your strategy five or six years ago. Gone are the days when recruiters just sit around waiting for the right people to find the right job and apply. Automation is here.
Sourcing itself is not a new development. However, the process has evolved dramatically thanks to new technology, data, and now, automation. Over the past decade, talent acquisition has undergone many changes including the development of recruitment marketing, social recruiting, job boards, and many technological innovation that are making the talent acquisition process so much faster and so much better. The number one new technology that everyone is talking about is Artificial Intelligence.
What is sourcing automation?
We’ve written previously on what changes AI will have on the industry as a whole. Sourcing automation is just a part of the broader recruiting automation category. Sourcing automation will simply replace the more tedious parts of the process that are often times monotonous. That could include screening candidate social profiles to glean bits of relevant information about the candidates that match the job description. That could mean a significant decline in the time taken to process and qualify candidates. One report has put the number of hours that recruiters spend on sourcing to around 13 hours/week. That is an expensive use of time compared to what can be done using automation. The results could be generated in minutes if not seconds.
What changes should you expect?
More data will become available which would make finding the best candidate so much easier. That will translate nicely into new products that allow you to enter a few candidate attributes and a list of qualified candidates would be generated. In short, a signification portion of the pre-qualification phase will be truncated. That also will pose its own challenges. The technology will have to be good at making sure no candidates are disqualified based on arbitrary features about their profiles.
Nonetheless, sourcing will become much more accurate and much more ubiquitous. That would largely be the effect of more and better data. There is also going to be significant challenges in the future. More legislation could make the collection of data more difficult. Only time will tell.
You should expect to see some chatbots and other ways to engage the candidate. This will largely be the result of the need to find out if those passive candidates are actually interested in whatever the recruiter is offering them.
The main takeaway is that significant changes lie ahead. The recruiting industry has done some significant advancements in the last few years and we should expect to see data playing a bigger role in how we hire and get hired.