Executive Summary:
- Active sourcing means proactively and specifically approaching candidates instead of "passively" "catching" them via job advertisements or similar.
- Active sourcing is one of the most valuable recruitment tools, saving time and money while delivering better results, especially for sought-after specialist roles.
- However, many companies use active sourcing incorrectly, which wastes resources and leads to disappointing results.
- Important: Personalize your approach to candidates; make sure you are targeting the right candidates; and ensure an efficient recruitment process.
- A useful addition - especially for companies with little experience - are so-called "Active Sourcing as a Service" providers.
Put yourself in two different scenarios that someone looking for new career opportunities might experience.
Scenario 1: You are on a relevant website for job advertisements. You see an advertisement from a company that you came across five weeks ago. At the time, you weren't entirely sure whether the role would suit you. It looks like you still have time to think about it: The position - with a CV and cover letter, of course - doesn't exactly seem to be running away.
Scenario 2: You are contacted on Linkedin by the company's HR department. The message is personalized, professional and demonstrates a deep understanding of the role and your relevant key points. The HR manager offers you a personal call to explore the fit between you and the company.
Which scenario would you prefer? For the vast majority of candidates, the answer is clear: scenario two wins. For you as a recruiter, this means that " active sourcing" is almost always superior. Now this is a truth that is fortunately gaining acceptance in more and more HR departments. What is less well known is that it is very, very easy to get active sourcing wrong. Time to shed some light on this.
Why active search works
The advantages of active search are obvious.
Instead of casting a line into the river and hoping that someone will bite, proactively approach the right talent. This saves time and creates an important selection filter, as you no longer have to sift through dozens of unsuitable CVs.
In this sense, active search means shorter search times and therefore lower costs.
This is also due to the fact that candidates prefer the proactive approach of a company. Not only does it offer a pleasant feeling of "being wanted", it also demonstrates sovereignty: this company knows exactly what it wants and who it wants for it. In a Linkedin survey, 89% of talents stated that they were quicker to accept a job offer that had been preceded by Active Search.
The importance of shorter search times can hardly be overestimated.
Many companies are not aware of the implicit and direct costs that a vacancy causes them - after all, it is an unfilled position that does not generate a function and can reduce the productivity of other filled positions. The career platform Stepstone calculates that vacancy costs range from EUR 16,056 (in accounting) to over EUR 37,000 (in IT and healthcare), depending on the industry - and accordingly measured by different average vacancy times, as recruitment is more or less difficult.
Last but not least, you benefit from a larger pool of candidates: With passive search - i.e. traditional job advertisements on job portals and all other formats that wait for candidates to come to you - you only catch those people who are actually looking, around 3% of the entire market. What you are completely missing are latent seekers. Those talents who are satisfied with an employer but could be convinced to make a career move. Incidentally, these candidates tend to be of a higher quality, as the best, most sought-after talents are less likely to be found on job portals. According to the HR platform Talentwunder, 32% of employees who are willing to change jobs never look at job portals. In various surveys, a fifth of respondents regularly state that they had changed jobs thanks to a proactive approach, even though they were not even looking for a job.
Good to know: The fact that candidates who emerge from an active search are of higher quality is not just an estimate, but empirical evidence: According to the Talentwunder study, actively approached people are seven to ten times more successful in the application process.
Avoid the traps
As good as active search sounds, there is a lot that can go wrong with it.
On average, 63.9% of actively approached candidates do not get back to us; in the highly competitive IT job market, the figure is 70.9%. Many candidates are even annoyed by active inquiries. "Only" 40% of the top 1,000 companies consider the cost-benefit ratio of active searches to be positive; in IT, the figure is 68.4%. One reason for the subdued figures: Many companies are still using active search stepmotherly and ineffectively; the results are sobering. Why?
The method stands and falls with the cover letter with which you contact the talents.
A good cover letter is immediately convincing and makes you want to find out more about the career opportunity. A poor cover letter comes across as bumbling and damages the employer brand. The first mistake is a standardized message with no personal reference. Such contact attempts mentally end up in the spam folder of talented people. According to an analysis by the University of Bamberg and Monster, almost seven out of ten messages allow themselves to make such a faux pas, which at first seems ingenious and cost-efficient, but in the end simply takes revenge with a lower search success rate.
Almost just as important are the details. What processes do you use to discover, pre-qualify and contact candidates?
If you write to candidates without explanation whose profile and skills do not obviously match the position, this is a mistake in your pre-qualification - one that two thirds of all companies make, by the way. And what do the processes look like that take effect afterwards, i.e. actually transfer the interested parties from the active search to your application process? Requesting a cover letter after you have actively contacted a candidate seems inconsistent. Simply referring them to online job advertisements after you have contacted them and asking them to apply is just as off-putting.
For many companies, the experience with the active search drum is more like a Greek tragedy: The HR department starts with a lot of enthusiasm and happily writes to candidates. They fall into the usual traps and do not achieve the results they had hoped for. After a few iterations and failures, it gives up and instead simply extends the job advertisements on relevant job portals, which gather more and more dust. After a while, the specialist departments put enough pressure on them that the HR department is forced to resort to headhunters and simply outsources the whole problem to someone else.
Good to know: When selecting headhunters, there are some things you can do wrong, but also some things you can do right. We explain more in our article "Success-based vs. retained search - which is better?"
There is no way around active search these days
Active search is a valuable tool in the search for candidates.
It saves time, costs and ensures better results when searching for personnel. For highly competitive talent profiles and industries, it is basically a must, as a large proportion of the relevant talent knows their market value and is "tied" to the company, i.e. cannot be reached through traditional job advertisements. Many companies rely on active search in particular when a position is difficult to fill or needs to be filled quickly - and then give up if they do not achieve the results they had hoped for.
This makes it all the more important that HR departments learn how to use active search correctly or rely on external service providers for so-called "Active Sourcing as a Service" (ASaaS).
What at first glance looks like higher costs - after all, you have to forge personalized messages or bring in external consultants - quickly pays for itself by filling a position in less time and with higher quality. And don't forget: the most expensive thing about recruitment is the vacancies. Active search is the smarter solution.
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