You may be asking yourself, “How can I source candidates within Greenhouse?” or “How can I do a better job of attracting top-notch talent?” These are top-of-mind questions that our Customer Success team often receives and the good news is that there are many ways you can effectively source candidates or prospects within the platform.
In this article, we’ll share our in-product features that support different sourcing strategies and touch on how to check the effectiveness of those strategies. Throughout the article, you’ll find many links that will guide you toward specific features and other recommended resources.
One of the first steps to optimizing your sourcing strategy is to assess your current sourcing strategy. Aside from posting jobs to your careers page, are you using any other methods to help attract and bring in candidates or reach out to prospects? There are various features in Greenhouse that can help with attracting talent.
Post to third-party job boards
One of the best and most automated ways to ensure that you’re tracking where candidates are applying from is to set up a unique tracking link for each job post. You can learn more about setting up unique tracking links and managing your sources here.
If you have already set up your tracking links, experiment and get creative! Consider changing up your job title to A/B test your job posts.
For example, you may find that “Client Success Manager” may result in more relevant candidates than “Customer Relations Associate.” You may also consider spending resources on premium advertising on third-party job boards to see if it will bring in more candidates.
Another strategy is to review the current third-party job boards that you’re posting to and consider posting to other job boards or community and college groups and threads. Just remember to generate a tracking link for the appropriate source!
Set up scheduled social media posts
Chances are, most of us are on at least one social network, whether it’s through Twitter, or LinkedIn. Tap into that network to share your organization’s open jobs.
Greenhouse Recruiting offers the ability to post directly or schedule posts to your personal social accounts. You can learn how to set up your social accounts here.
When users post to their networks through Greenhouse Recruiting, they’ll be credited as the source when an applicant clicks and applies for a job through their link. After a role is posted, Job and Site Admins can review the reach from the posts under the Social Media section on the Sourcing tab of the job.
Knowing someone’s reach can be beneficial, especially when you have a hard-to-fill job. Ask those well-connected colleagues to help promote your open job to cast a wider net!
Set up a referral program
Studies have shown that referrals are the number one source of great candidates. Referrals cost less, are a better fit, have higher performance, and lower turnover.
Greenhouse Recruiting makes it easy for your entire organization to submit referrals by allowing every user a basic level of access so they can log in and submit applicants they consider a good fit for the role or the organization.
An effective way to encourage referrals is to create a referral program. If you already have a referral program but want to increase participation in your organization, you may want to revamp your program or throw a Referral Party.
We have additional resources on boosting your referral programs on our Greenhouse Marketing Blog and an e-Book on how to build a strong employee referral program here.
Source candidates internally
In addition to company referrals, consider sourcing internally!
The people within your own organization have great institutional knowledge, so tap into your internal network before searching outside of your organization.
Advanced or Expert tier customers can learn how to set up an Internal Job Board here.
Source candidates externally using Sourcing Automation
Sourcing Automation is an add-on product in Greenhouse Recruiting that makes sourcing your superpower by helping you find, reach, and engage top talent quickly and effectively.
As an outbound sourcing solution, Sourcing Automation provides the following benefits:
- Looks up and retrieves accurate contact information for identified prospects
- Bolsters recruiter outreach through personalized and automated email campaigns
- Tracks prospect engagement and centralizes sourcing activities within Greenhouse Recruiting
- Provides robust reports to measure sourcing efficacy and talent pipeline health
Click here to learn more.
Use a Greenhouse sourcing Partner
We partner with many sourcing companies that have helpful software for different needs. You can review these Partners on our Integrations page (visible for Site and Job Admins only).
Use the Greenhouse prospecting tools
Bring the power of CRM to where you are working. Once installed, the Greenhouse Recruiting Chrome extension allows your organization to add prospects to your Greenhouse CRM from a website, resume, or manually through the plugin without leaving your current workflow.
For customers with a Sourcing Automation seat, the extension also retrieves accurate prospect contact information using state-of-the-art algorithms and multiple data sources.
If you’re paying for a LinkedIn Recruiter license (not Recruiter Lite), Greenhouse and LinkedIn have teamed up on our LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect (RSC) integration.
Email prospective applicants in bulk
If you are attending in-person events such as meetups or career fairs, be sure to collect your attendees’ contact information and potential areas of interest within your organization!
Greenhouse Recruiting has a Prospecting Template that helps you collect their information and easily upload it into Greenhouse. You can learn more about setting up a Bulk Import here.
When you upload contacts through the Bulk Import tool, everyone will be added as a prospect, as opposed to a candidate. A prospect is someone who hasn't officially applied to a job yet but can be converted to a candidate for a job once they have applied. It’s easy to search the group of prospects you’ve uploaded via an automatic tag that is added to the Bulk Import group during the upload.
To communicate with these added prospects, use our Bulk Edit feature to send a bulk email to thank the group for attending your event and include a unique tracking link to encourage them to apply. Additionally, this communication is tracked on the prospect's profile in Greenhouse Recruiting to give you a comprehensive set of data.
Measure the effectiveness of your sourcing strategies
After you’ve had a chance to decide on the features you want to use to help support your sourcing strategy, it’s best to also look at the data supporting your decision. Here are a few reprots to help you understand your Sourcing ROI:
- Our Candidate Quality by Source report shows where your current applicants are coming from and how far they are making it in on your pipeline. To make sure this report is up to date, ensure that your team is always using unique tracking links when posting to third-party job boards and accurately adding sources for each candidate.
- The Job Post Conversion report shows how many applicants are viewing your job posts and applying, providing a conversion rate. If your strategy is to A/B test your job posts on third-party job boards, you will want to look at this report to view conversion rates for each job.
- Running the Referrals Over Time report is extremely helpful if you’ve made a big push to increase referrals at your organization. Run this report to see how your internal campaign impacted the number of new referrals!
Looking at the data from these reports will help inform where to spend your resources and time, leading to a more targeted and data-driven approach to sourcing.
Next steps
As you can see, there are a lot of ways you can use Greenhouse to help optimize sourcing. If you want a quick review, check out these easy-to-remember steps:
- Identify your sourcing goals for the year, quarter, and month.
- Review the different strategies listed above. Perhaps there are some strategies that you’re not using yet or others you could take a step further.
- Create a strategy that will work with your organization and get creative with the ways you source! Don’t be afraid to change it up if you’re not seeing the results you’re hoping for, and be open to non-traditional methods of sourcing your candidates.
- Leverage reporting to see if there has been any change or impact especially before and after you’ve revamped your strategies.