The impact of AI on sourcing

The times of post and pray are over. In today’s chronically tight labour market, we need smart sourcing strategies to target and engage passive job seekers. Sourcing calls for a different – more time-consuming – approach than traditional recruitment. But not to worry, as Ronald van Driel of RecruitAgent.ai explains, because artificial intelligence (AI) can help expedite and streamline things.

A recruiter typically approaches, builds rapport and engages with, and selects available candidates. But that no longer fits the bill in a labour market where good talent is hard to find, whether an organisation is hiring for an executive role or a run-of-the-mill operational position.

Hence the need and urgency for sourcing. Sourcing goes way beyond scouring LinkedIn for people who have activated the ‘open to work’ feature on their profile. A sourcer will also attempt to identify target groups of potential hires who are not actively looking for a job. This is where recruitment and sourcing are very different and where they rely on diverse strategies. Even the AI impact is different.

‘Recruitment and sourcing are two vastly distinct disciplines,’ says Ronald van Driel, who is the founder of RecruitAgent.ai, an AI-driven platform that uses automated intake to generate personalised job ads and recruitment campaigns in just a few minutes. The personalities of recruiters and sourcers tend to be quite different too. ‘A recruiter will engage with people throughout the organisation, also dropping in on the CEO for a chat, and use the input they have gathered to create job ads. A recruiter enjoys interacting with applicants and negotiating with agencies. Recruitment is a combination of interpersonal communication, sales and marketing. By contrast, a sourcer’s job is more research-oriented. They will spend most of their workday in front of a computer screen and reach out to candidates through smart messages. Sourcers are basically tech-savvy analytical thinkers. They’re very unlike recruiters in that sense.’

Smart candidate search queries using AI

Clearly, sourcing is much more encompassing than searching. A sourcer will not just go through LinkedIn profiles, but they will broaden the scope of the search by expanding the parameters of where and how candidates are found. The broader the scope, the more time-consuming the effort, it would seem. But with today’s rapidly advancing technology, smart solutions are now at our fingertips. Boolean strings, for instance, can help refine search results by allowing recruiters to include or exclude specific terms, creating complex queries that yield more relevant information.

Van Driel explains how this works. Say you are looking for IT specialists. Rather than maintaining a detailed LinkedIn profile, many IT professionals choose to showcase their skills and experience on websites of their own. By having Google index the entire internet based on a string of smart search terms in different document formats (pdf, Excel, Word), the search results will be more comprehensive than when simply scanning LinkedIn profiles. Van Driel: ‘A Boolean string can easily be spread across three or four lines. All you have to do is ask ChatGPT to create one for you.’

New-school sourcing

AI is a really helpful tool to create smart candidate search queries, but that is not all it can do. Will AI take over the jobs of sourcers (and recruiters) going forward? Van Driel: ‘I don’t think so. We’ll still need recruiters and sourcers. That said, AI will improve their work, making it smarter and more efficient, as well as more equitable. Its impact will be profound – we’re only at the beginning.’

Van Driel claims that the emergence of AI has already deeply affected the nature of sourcing processes. ‘Today’s sourcer probably operates at a level that’s somewhere between a recruiter and a sourcer. I can’t wait to find out how old-school sourcers will be transitioning from the traditional approach to new-school sourcing practices. I have a feeling that not everyone will be successful at adapting.’

Van Driel mentions Dux-Soup, a Dutch-developed LinkedIn automation tool, as an example of the subtle mix of tech and interpersonal communication. In a standard LinkedIn search, the tool will use the list of results to send connection requests to some dozens of leads every day using automatic messages crafted earlier. ‘The feedback I get is that people are happy to get a personal message rather than a canned one, as they so often do. Mind you, that’s even before I’ve sent them a message that’s been tailored to their profile or reply once they’ve accepted my connection request. This helps me expand my network and interact with potential candidates.’

Another example of an AI application in recruitment is RecruitAgent; Van Driel is a co-founder of the firm that developed this tool. They use AI to create job ads with a higher success rate and a faster turnaround. ‘We’re getting about ten times more applicants than we used to with random ads.’ At a speed that cannot be beat, not even by a recruiter. What is more, smart AI, automatic pre-population and ChatGPT will put together a job ad in just five minutes, Van Driel claims.

The use of AI in recruitment and sourcing is a need rather than a luxury in the chronically tight Dutch labour market, Van Driel says. ‘Bringing on new employees is getting more challenging all the time. Posting job ads is not enough. Depending on the target group of course, they will only reach active job seekers, who make up about 3% to 15% of the market, but not the large group of passive job seekers.’

Van Driel cites Recruit Robin as an example of an AI tool that targets passive job seekers. This tool will look for leads in multiple databases, including your own and LinkedIn, and give you suggestions. As the system learns every time a recruiter rates the results, they will significantly improve after a few weeks or months. This calls for discipline on the part of the recruiter, but it is definitely worth the effort, Van Driel explains. ‘As a recruiter/sourcer, you’re better off spending your precious time focusing on augmenting your AI tool and on machine learning.’

Experimenting

Smarter and more efficient sourcing using AI-driven tooling really is possible, says Van Driel. But there are hundreds of recruitment tools. Which one to choose? Van Driel has a simple answer: ‘Select one, two or even three tools that look promising to you and that are affordable. Start experimenting. If you don’t like one particular tool or the results are disappointing, cast it aside and try the next one. The important thing is to get started, preferably with RecruitAgent.ai of course, the tool my firm has developed. This free and ready-to-use application will help you kickstart your recruitment process from day one.’