Risks Associated with Direct Sourcing & What to Do About Them

From small and midsize enterprises to mega corporations, top talent is an asset to any organization. However, employers still struggle to fill vacancies in the increasingly competitive labor market. As businesses re-evaluate their hiring structures, many companies are choosing direct sourcing for efficient recruitment.

Describing Direct Sourcing

Before delving into the advantages and risks associated with direct sourcing, let’s define this recruitment method. Often referred to as self-sourcing, this approach is the creation, population and management of a talent pool populated with professionals meeting the required skills and capabilities.  Best in class direct sourcing solutions go beyond stagnant talent pools to the creation of highly interactive talent communities. 

Direct sourcing  benefits you in several ways. It expands the traditional reach of your staffing agencies and internal recruiters, providing an additional source of great talent – regardless of worker category – in areas of greatest need.   Great talent is made available at a lower mark-up than typically applied to a staffing agency recruited resource. Leading direct sourcing platforms fully integrate with your VMS and the rest of your talent ecosystem, fully supporting a single approach to requesting a resource regardless of type. Direct Sourcing candidates have been pre-screened, saving vetting and onboarding time and effort. And, continuous curation and nurturing leads to continued candidate interest. 

Challenges of Direct Sourcing

While direct sourcing is an effective strategy to secure talent, the effort to create and maintain a successful direct sourcing program can be significant. Challenges include: 

• Talent Pool Design – efforts include Identification of the resource types (defined by skill, location, diversity status or other criteria) to be included in the talent community and agreement on the internal and external sources for finding the required talent. 
• Talent Community Development – Direct sourcing is enabled by technology.  The technology platform must integrate with the existing VMS and other elements of your talent ecosystem so that your user community experiences a single approach to issuing a requisition, receiving and evaluating candidates, and making a selection.  It must offer a landing page within the talent community platform as a portal entry for candidates and posting of available positions.  Targeted campaigns must be conducted to attract diverse talent aligned with your goals such as returning veterans, women, minority groups, LGBTQ community, etc. And, of course, roll-out of the direct sourcing solution must include program implementation, change management, audience-specific training, documentation, and ongoing program assessment and enhancement.   
• Talent Community Administration – Without continuous outreach to talent community members, the system will become stale, filled with outdated information and individuals whose interest in future roles within your company is diminishing.  Ongoing interactions with the Talent community are needed to maintain candidate interest in future opportunities. 
• Worker Engagement – When individuals are selected from the talent community for temporary assignments, issues must be addressed regarding worker contracting, onboarding, payrolling, invoicing, offboarding, and more.  

Overcoming Risks Associated with Direct Sourcing

If you are unprepared or unwilling to take on the burden of standing up and managing a direct sourcing program, but would like to realize the benefits, seek the assistance of a professional services firm experienced in strategic talent access.  Evaluate their direct sourcing capabilities in terms of program design, talent outreach and curation strategies, program implementation and – most importantly – ongoing nurturing of the talent community members.  To learn more, visit our website to connect with a direct sourcing expert.