How to Choose The Best Candidate Sourcing Platform

Introduction

Owing to business uncertainties and technological advancements, including AI and Gen AI, we are seeing the rise of a skills-based economy. Talent Acquisition (TA) will become a critical component of the talent strategy, helping employers navigate business challenges. For this, TA will require new skills, new tools, and agility to attract, hire, and retain the best talent.

73% of recruiting pros say hiring based on skills is a priority

In fact, Recruitment will hold the onus of building the skills- based workforce of the future, and gain more strategic importance in the overall talent strategy and business strategy. More and more organizations will prioritize skills-based hiring and upskilling to help widen their talent pools and find qualified workers.

Challenges In Sourcing Right Talent:

Over 3 in 4 organizations have had difficulty recruiting for full-time regular positions, and 3 in 4 report that it has been somewhat or very difficult to find qualified individuals with the new skills they need.

Finding the right talent for the right business outcomes is become an increasingly difficult challenge, given the rampant skill shortage, changing shape of work, different employee expectations, and the man-machine flux. The top five challenges are low number of applicants (60%), competition from other employers (55%), and an increase in candidate “ghosting” (46%), local markets not producing enough qualified job candidates (33%), and lack of interest by job seekers (28%). Such challenges exist at every point of the Recruitment funnel, from Sourcing to Screening to Shortlisting to Selecting the “right fit”. Hence investing in the right TA processes, technologies and tools is important.

Role of Candidate Sourcing Platforms

Talent Acquisition professionals and recruiters must become more strategic in their talent search. In order to optimize the recruiting process at every recruiting stage for both quality and quantity, it is important to bring together the best blend of Tech and Touch. Candidate Sourcing Platforms offer the technology element, in the form of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and other recruiting software. Tech has the power to offer deep insights into skills demand and supply, enabling a data-backed view of the talent landscape, and thereby empowering recruiters and hiring managers to make more informed hiring decisions. Tech also streamlines the actual hiring process, making it more efficient and effective, especially relevant for large volumes, niche skills and senior ‘hard to find’ talent. However, amidst this increasing human-machine teaming, keeping people at the heart of the productivity equation ensures that the gains delivered will be shared by all.  The right talent platform must balance both these elements. 

What Makes a Candidate Sourcing Platform Great?

A candidate sourcing platform must align with the strategic business objectives. Any Candidate Sourcing Platform should meet both effectiveness and efficiency, and therein optimize the org-wide hiring metrics: 

• Efficient: A talent platform must enable recruiters to hire quickly at scale, in line with the changing business needs, with an ideal workforce mix. Speed, scale, and agility across all steps i.e. sourcing, screening, shortlisting, selecting, and onboarding are a must to minimize the time to hire. Moreover, this should work for diverse talent groups, be it full time employees, on demand workforce, returnships, apprenticeships, CXO-level talent, or any others. Moreover, it must enable cost-effective hiring, minimizing the cost per hire.
• Effective: Quality of hire is critical to talent success, because the performance of new hires directly impacts the organizational performance. A Talent Sourcing Platform should enable top quality hiring to actually translate skills to business-forward outcomes. This means identifying the “right fit” on various parameters such as skill-role-fit-location-type of engagement, and even softer aspects like DEI, values and culture. Also, in today’s digital age, the candidate experience feeds into the employer brand, and hence the platform should deliver positive candidate satisfaction through positive candidate engagement, even at scale.

What to Look for in Your Ideal Candidate Sourcing Platform ?

A Candidate Sourcing Platform should be selected such that it offers recruiters great talent access, talent availability, and talent agility, and is suited to diverse business situations and the business goals. This means … 

• Data-backed talent intelligence: Strong data capabilities helps feed recruiters with in-depth talent intelligence, to be able to take an informed talent search. For example, a platform with a pool of global workforce across domains and industries will help recruiters tap into deep expertise and rich experience. 
• AI-powered source – search – screen capabilities: Today, talent must match not only skills, but many parameters, like skill-role-fit-location-type of engagement, and even culture. AI’s search and match capabilities can help arrive at this “right fit” accurately and in less time. 
• Wider talent access: Talent platforms which support a blended workforce strategy or an on-demand talent strategy can help recruiters access a wider, flexible, talent pool which goes beyond conventional talent pools. 
• Flexible hiring formats: Flexible work formats can make diverse skills available to organizations easier, better, faster and as and when required. Talent platforms should host “on demand talent” such as fractional CXOs, project consultants, subject matter experts and advisors, domain experts, short term talent, interim talent, gig talent, apprentices, returnships, and freelancers, which can be hired as per the need. 
• Agility & Scalability: An agile talent model can help continuously align with changing business needs, for example, hiring on demand can help modify talent as per business ramp ups and ramp downs. Similarly, a blended talent approach means companies can scale up their talent quickly, for example, for high growth phases. 
• Talent Operations and talent management: Managing a diverse workforce across different work formats is an operationally heavy and cost intensive task, which is best outsourced to a talent platform. A talent platform which automates employee management, contract management, governance, payments, and such manual talent operations is a boon for streamlining TA. 
• Candidate engagement features: Functionalities and workflows which help engage with candidates are a must in any TA tool. Features such as auto-emailers, reminders, notifications, conversational chatbots to address candidate queries, are essential to create a strong employer value proposition (EVP). 

Above all, the…

• Human Touch: At the core, humans are still recruiting humans. Hence, upholding the “human touch” is critical to hire right. A talent platform which uses tech to automate processes and workflows, but builds in touchpoints of recruiters, TA leaders, hiring managers, leaders, and people at large, shall help retain the intangible human component, making people feel truly heard and valued. The right guidance and handholding of talent experts’ goes a long way in building such talent platforms.

How Solvecube Can Help Source Best Candidates?

Solvecube offers an overall blueprint for people strategy and talent acquisition, with a focus on enabling access to flexible, on-demand talent pools. The integrated talent platform is designed to help businesses find and hire ‘hard to find’, mature talent with ease, scale, speed, accuracy and cost efficiency.

Solvecube Services – a Roundup

Solvecube’s three-pronged Platform-Tools-Services approach provides a complete solution for people strategy.

• Platform: Solvecube’s USP is its AI-powered candidate sourcing and search platform, which enables access to a high knowledge-high experience global talent pool of domain experts. High tech capability covers the entire recruitment process from JD generation to Sourcing to Searching to Rank-ordered Shortlisting, completed in 30 minutes or less. Whereas, high touch is ensured by assignment of an RM, who works closely with the client to deliver curated candidate shortlists in 48 hours or less. These features help recruiters and TA leaders connect with the right decision.
• HR Tools (ice.cube, p.three, hr.ready) support the talent strategy.
• Talent Services centred on flexible, needs-based talent fulfilment along with full time hiring ensures curation to customer’s recruiting needs and talent goals. For example, Experts on Demand, Recruiters on Demand, Strategic Partner, Business Growth Partner, and Employer of Record.

Deep People Advisory is enabled through a rich-experienced founding team which advises customers on what shall work best for their business.
Solvecube thus adds value along the entire value chain, from Sourcing-Selecting-Screening-Shortlisting-Contracting-Workforce and Employee Management.

Key features of the platform – How does SolveCube candidate sourcing work?

Some key features to look out for…

• AI-powered JD generation ensuring fast and precise JD to skills matching. 
• AI-powered, fast and accurate Sourcing with access to a dynamically aggregated talent pool – on demand talent pool of 20,000+ and an aggregated talent pool of 580+ million.
• AI-powered, rank-ordered targeted Shortlisting that are defined by skill-role-fit-location-type of engagement (permanent, short term, fractional, remote, interim) all in one go. 
• Human-led, RM-vetted curated candidate shortlists in 48 hours
• Global talent access to a widespread and geolocation-agnostic talent pool. 
• Talent Process streamlining with facility to carry out end-to-end Hiring & Management of formulation of candidate-employer  partnerships across 150+ Countries with Employer on Record (EoR)
• Ready and easy access to ‘hard to find’, senior level and C-suite level mature professionals, across domains and industries. 
• Needs-based flexible Hiring i.e. on demand hiring or blended workforce strategies, available as per business needs.
• Specific hiring needs, for example DEI-centric hiring

Plus, talent advisory solutions from an expert leadership team of industry experts with over 4 decades of hands-on, multidisciplinary experience, ensures Solvecube offers the one-stop-shop blueprint for people strategy.

The choice of a right talent platform can make all the difference between achieving and not achieving one’s talent goals. The CEO and CXOs must begin this selection process by first understanding the talent needs, how they support the business goals, and then devise a strategic talent plan to unravel the true potential of the workforce strategy.

As Chandru P., Founder and Managing director, Solvecube, puts it, “We pioneer solutions using technology innovatively, to solve every problem to do with people in business”.