Given the challenges that exist in recruitment today, there are a lot of advantages of having a strong employer brand that you can leverage in the talent market. According to a LinkedIn 2021 Employer Brand Statistics study, 72% of talent will consider employer branding before applying for a position. Using your brand to connect with candidates is the basis of direct sourcing, which provides a whole new range of opportunities for organizations to find and engage ideal people for a broad spectrum of roles. So, what’s involved when it comes to using direct sourcing to enhance your brand equity?

First, let’s define direct sourcing

This is not, as many have assumed, where an organization goes out into the talent market and directly recruits people to the business. Instead, it’s an outsourced recruiting and engagement service that requires an experienced partner like HireGenics. Your talent engagement partner provides a dedicated team to develop and execute a strategy to directly engage talent in your labor market by leveraging your brand equity to attract the best talent. This is in contrast to other staffing supplier-led approaches to recruitment, which do not focus on your brand but rather the job itself. This approach may result in missing the best talent and potential brand tarnish.

How does direct sourcing enhance your brand?

There are many ways in which direct sourcing will have a positive impact on your brand equity. The benefits of direct sourcing create distinct advantages that shore up brand equity, from shorter recruitment times to empowering candidates to view and apply to any open position. This translates into connecting with candidates that are likely to be a better fit with the business in the long term. The business benefits through better alignment with your talent acquisition strategies, higher manager satisfaction, shorter recruitment and placement timing, and development of a ready-to-work talent pool. Direct Sourcing helps to ensure that every experience a candidate has with your brand in a recruitment context is consistent and high quality. Getting this wrong could be costly. A US Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that a mismatched candidate could cost an employer as much as 30% of their first year’s salary.

A more imaginative approach to managing the talent supply chain

Direct sourcing recreates how the traditional talent supply chain operates within a business, specifically regarding contingent workers.  For example, candidates that come from more traditional sources of talent, such as small service providers, consulting firms, or workers who come from staffing providers often lack the ability to determine the company they work for or the roles they desire. Direct sourcing provides a pathway for candidates to seek out employer brands for whom they desire to work and to apply directly to roles that match their skills and qualifications. Direct Sourcing is a particularly effective solution where hiring volume is high, geographically concentrated, and there is a concentration of consistent job descriptions and candidate requirements.

Why opt for direct sourcing?

Direct Sourcing aligns your contingent labor talent strategy with your FTE strategy by directly engaging high quality talent, in the right place, at the right time, and at the right price. It’s not only a way to help find options for existing open roles but also to boost brand equity and build up proprietary talent communities that create long-term resource options for the business.

Direct sourcing is increasingly becoming a choice for organizations that are looking to leverage their brand equity and improve the overall experience for both contingent and FTE candidates. The success of direct sourcing has been proven to be most effective when presenting a strong and attractive employer brand.

HireGenics partners with industry-leading third-party technology vendors to deliver talent solutions that allow our clients to grow and curate talent pools by leveraging their brands. Get in touch today to see how HireGenics can help support leveraging your organization’s brand power in developing a strategy to build a high-performing talent community.