Active sourcing is a collective term for various recruitment methods. Basically, it refers to the targeted, proactive search, approach and recruitment of potential employees for an external or own company. According to the definition, active sourcing also includes the intention to initially bind these employees to the company. An alternative term is effective sourcing. People who practice this are referred to as active sourcers. The key to active sourcing is always a thorough search to find the best possible candidate for a specific position and to convince them of the merits of the job. In order to arouse this interest, active sourcing offers various methods that can be used by recruiters.

Active sourcing recruiting is increasingly taking place online. For this reason, business networking platforms such as XING or LinkedIn have enormous added value for active sourcers, as they have millions of potential contacts at their disposal. The same applies to social networks such as Facebook, although the difficulty here is that people do not usually register there for professional or career-related reasons. It is important to find out which of these channels the target groups use before making contact.

There are seven different active sourcing methods & tools:

• Career websites
• Talent pools
• Referral sourcing (employee recommendation)
• Career pages
• Profile mining - profile search via social media channels (Xing, LinkedIn)
• CV Database Search (database search using complete CVs)
• Search engines (Boolean search commands)
• Career events (personal contact on site)

Active sourcing providers help companies with:

• Development of suitable sourcing models
• find suitable talent
• Reduce recruitment costs
• Shorten time-to-hire
• Achieving HR goals

The most important components of recruitment are the branding of the company, the management of a talent pool, the career or job page on the website, social media recruitment (e.g. LinkedIn), job advertisements, job boards and active sourcing.

The importance of active sourcing is the direct answer to the shortage of skilled workers. This means that most promising candidates are not actively looking for a job. As a result, the old approach of posting job ads and waiting no longer works and does not always produce the desired quality of candidates. With active sourcing, HR managers try to make personal contact with precisely these passive candidates. Beforehand, it must be analyzed where the target groups can best be reached and, above all, which approach must be chosen so that the candidate is interested in another company and another position.

When filling hard-to-fill positions, active sourcing is more cost-effective and efficient than traditional job advertisements. When searching for talent, you make a pre-selection of candidates. This means less wastage and less effort in the selection process. These are the decisive advantages of active sourcing.

Recruitment is essential nowadays because the job market has fundamentally changed. Prospective candidates are looking for the perfect job at the right moment and need to be convinced by the prospective employer that this job is exactly what they are looking for. Branding, the candidate experience and many other topics play a role in this.

Standardized requests in Active Sourcing HR annoy the recipients. An argument why you in particular should never resort to standardized information:

• Avoid standard formulations and mass texts.
• Individualize the approach.
• Remember: nobody wants to be one of many.

The key to a successful active sourcing strategy is the optimal use of multiple channels. Although you are probably already using some channels, you should consider whether there are new channels you can try. However, keep in mind that while this list contains many ideas, there may be even more specific channels used by your target audience. Therefore, make sure you do your own research as part of your active sourcing strategy.

Direct approach or active sourcing IT refers to the personal approach of an individual person in order to attract the candidate to your company. In the IT sector in particular, this is the most common and most promising method of finding candidates. The concept of direct approach is becoming increasingly important due to the current labor market situation. Today's candidates are not actively searching, but are in a permanent employment relationship. These passive candidates can only be convinced by an added value that the current employer does not offer.

Times are changing and so is recruitment. It is therefore imperative that personnel recruitment has future skills that positively promote the candidate experience and correctly attract and deploy resources. These skills are taught, for example, in the CAS People Attraction Excellence FH.

There are many tools, here are the ten most important for active sourcing:

• LinkedIn and XING
• Country-specific business network platforms
• Kununu
• Facebook
• Google
• Twitter
• Blogs
• YouTube
• Google+
• Reddit

The best active sourcing tool must be found for each job.