Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face unique challenges in attracting and retaining top talent. Limited resources, lack of dedicated recruitment teams, and the need for agility in hiring can often put smaller businesses at a disadvantage.
Yes, we’re here to dispel the misconception that RPO is a luxury reserved for large enterprises with deep pockets. By offering scalable, expert-driven talent solutions, RPO providers are leveling the playing field. They bring enterprise-grade hiring practices within reach of SMEs, allowing them to compete for talent on par with larger corporations.
Let’s explore how RPO is reshaping the talent landscape for businesses of all sizes.
The Shifting Landscape of RPO
Data from Everest Group highlights a striking trend: the proportion of new RPO deals involving smaller organizations nearly doubled from 23% in 2017 to 43% in 2022. This significant shift underscores the growing recognition among SMEs of RPO’s value in scaling hiring efforts and navigating an unpredictable labor market.
Leading providers are offering more flexible, short-term solutions designed to address immediate needs without the lengthy implementation periods traditionally associated with RPO. For instance, modular solutions like PeopleScout’s Amplifiers™ and our ready-to-go RPO solution, Accelerate™, allow smaller enterprises to harness the power of RPO faster. These innovations are making RPO more accessible and responsive to the dynamic needs of growing businesses, further democratizing access to professional recruitment expertise.
Debunking the “Big Business Only” Myth: Why SMEs are Embracing RPO
The notion that RPO is exclusive to large enterprises is a myth. In reality, RPO can be particularly effective for SMEs experiencing rapid growth or expanding their geographic reach. Here’s why:
Unmatched Expertise: RPO providers bring a wealth of experience gathered from working with diverse clients across many industries. Smaller companies gain access to seasoned recruiters, best practices and industry insights to help them compete for top talent. Plus, an RPO partner will help you develop and refine your recruitment processes, setting a foundation for sustainable growth.
Scalability and Flexibility: As you scale, an RPO solution will adapt to your fluctuating talent needs. Whether you need to ramp up hiring quickly for a new product launch or scale down during slower periods, RPO offers an agility that you can’t replicate in-house.
Time-Saving Efficiency: By taking on time-consuming tasks like sourcing, interview scheduling and candidate management, RPO partners free up your internal teams—from HR to hiring managers—to focus on strategic priorities and business objectives.
Cost Management: RPO streamlines processes and leverages cutting-edge recruitment technologies, often resulting in significant cost savings and more manageable recruitment spend compared to maintaining a full-time in-house team or relying on traditional staffing agencies.
Access to the Latest Technology: Speaking of technology, leading RPOs have their finger on the pulse of the ever-expanding talent tech marketplace. Look for a partner who offers technology consulting to advise on how to capitalize on your existing recruitment tech stack or to recommend new tools to introduce more automation, analytics and innovation for better candidate experience.
Enhanced Candidate Experience: RPO providers excel at creating a memorable candidate journey, from initial contact through onboarding, ensuring a positive experience that reflects well on your brand.
Is RPO Right for Your Business?
If you’re a small or medium-sized business looking to scale, improve your hiring processes, or simply manage recruitment more effectively, RPO is worth considering. The key is finding an RPO partner that will take the time to understand your unique needs and will tailor a solution to align with your company’s goals and culture.
PeopleScout’s RPO solutions provide value for businesses of all sizes. We’re not just focused on filling positions; we’re here to help you build a talent acquisition strategy that can drive your business forward. Whether you’re a startup looking to make your first key hires or a mid-sized company aiming to optimize your recruitment process, PeopleScout RPO might be just what you need. Let’s connect!
PeopleScout’s Direct Sourcing is a tech-powered solution for engaging top talent for permanent and contingent roles, while leveraging the power of your employer brand. We lay the framework for a sustainable total talent strategy by proactively creating a pipeline of freelance, temporary and permanent talent from your existing database combined with our global reach of 1.3B candidate profiles.
Direct sourcing is a pivotal strategy in talent acquisition that empowers organizations to proactively identify, attract and engage top talent. With the growth of the gig economy and blurring of lines between full-time and temporary employment, workers who traditionally seek full-time employment are increasingly willing to take up temporary placements—and vice versa. Organizations that create…
Direct Sourcing by PeopleScout PeopleScout’s Direct Sourcing is a tech-powered solution for engaging top talent for permanent and contingent roles, while leveraging the power of your employer brand. We lay the framework for a sustainable total talent strategy by proactively creating a pipeline of freelance, temporary and permanent talent from your existing database combined with…
Situation This Australian radiology network operates in 270 clinics, employs over 350 doctors and 4,000 staff and performs over six million patient procedures a year, making them one of the largest medical imaging providers in the world. The organization needed to hire high-volume, critical healthcare roles across both metropolitan and regional locations, but they were…
Skills profiles across industries have already changed dramatically and will continue to evolve at breakneck speed. In the next 15 years, we’ll see a staggering change in the skills required to perform our work. The mismatch between the demands of the future workforce and traditional recruitment practices emphasizes why skills-based hiring strategies are now mission critical. To address these shifts, organizations must take a more nuanced approach to the evaluation of a candidate’s abilities. A skills-based assessment can provide a comprehensive profile of a candidate’s capabilities, allowing talent acquisition leaders to understand not just if someone can perform a role but their potential for future growth.
So, how can organizations effectively incorporate skills assessments into their talent acquisition strategy? This article will cover types of skills-based assessments, the benefits and some tips on how to get started.
The Limitations of Old Evaluation Methods
For decades, a candidate’s educational qualifications and work history served as proxies for their potential job performance. Hiring managers relied on academic degrees and years of experience to determine if someone had the necessary knowledge and abilities to succeed in a role. Traditional methods of evaluating candidates based solely on educational credentials and work experience are becoming increasingly ineffective in predicting job success.
Research shows these résumé- or CV-based evaluation methods have significant flaws:
Educational attainment does not always equal job performance. A recent study revealed that 72% employers don’t see a degree as a reliable signal for assessing the skills of a candidate. Yet, 52% are still hiring from degree programs because it’s considered a less risky choice.
Work experience becomes an unreliable indicator as jobs evolve. As skills requirements change, years spent in a role does not mean someone has the skills needed for that same role in the years to come.
These methods exhibit bias and lack diversity. Over-reliance on education disqualifies capable candidates who lack degrees for socioeconomic reasons. According to Deloitte, a third of Gen Zers and millennials say they decided not to pursue higher education with the leading reason being financial constraints.
Defining Skills for Your Organization
The term “skill” is broad and encompasses every type of characteristic or capability that could be needed by employees to do a great job in a role. Capturing and defining skills requirements across your organization is an essential first step for developing a skills-based model.
So, what skills should companies look to define? Skills fall within three categories:
Hard Skills / Technical Skills: These are the expertise areas like programming languages (i.e., python, Java), data analysis, financial modeling, and other role-specific knowledge. While they’re crucial for many jobs, they actually make up a small fraction of the overall skills picture.
Soft Skills: Often undervalued, soft skills like problem-solving, emotional intelligence, communication and critical thinking are the grease that allows hard skills to operate smoothly. For most roles outside of niche specialties, these human skills make up the vast majority of what’s needed for success.
Values Alignment and Organizational Fit: Less about executing the day-to-day work, this is about whether someone’s personality, mindset and motivations mesh with the company culture and values. It’s about determining if the candidate embodies the attitudes and behaviors you want to see in the role and at your organization.
Making the effort to align on the skills needed for each role across your organization will not only ensure the success of your skills-based assessment transformation but will also support learning and development, career pathing and talent management.
Types of Skills-Based Assessment
As part of a skills-based hiring strategy, skills assessments focus on a candidate’s demonstrated skills and competencies rather than traditional qualifications like education, years of experience or work history. Skills-based assessments help you map a candidate’s skillset to a role’s requirements, gauging whether someone can actually perform well according to the role’s core skills. It also helps you judge candidates objectively, removing barriers for underrepresented groups, and find the best match for the job.
Different types of skills-based assessments provide a more predictive and holistic view of talent, including:
Hard Skills
Skills assessments that measure hard skills help you evaluate technical capabilities like programming, data analytics, writing and more that power performance in specific job tasks.
Hard skills-based assessment examples:
Coding tests: For technical roles, coding tests can assess a candidate’s programming skills, problem-solving abilities and familiarity with specific languages or frameworks.
Simulations: Hands-on simulations or role-playing exercises can assess a candidate’s ability to perform specific job-related tasks, providing insights into their practical skills and competencies.
Soft Skills
Skills-based assessment for soft skills help identify transferable abilities like communication, problem-solving and emotional intelligence that enable workplace success.
Soft skills-based assessment examples:
Situational judgement test: SJTs present candidates with multiple job-related scenarios and asks them to choose the most appropriate response from a list of options. Having an SJT as part of your assessment center lets you evaluate candidates’ performance against real-world scenarios. Plus, candidates get a better feel for what the day-to-day job would look like.
Case studies: Presenting candidates with realistic business scenarios or case studies can evaluate their analytical thinking, decision-making and problem-solving capabilities in ways relevant to the job.
Interviews: Asking in the interview about preferred approach and style allows the candidate to self-report.
Values Fit
Values fit assessment measures alignment between a candidate’s outlook and company culture, which can impact employee engagement and retention.
Values fit assessment examples:
Values questionnaires: Values questionnaires are designed to measure a candidate’s values, beliefs and motivations to help you understand what drives a candidate and how well their values align with your company’s culture and mission. However, hiring managers may feel confident when they see a candidate’s values in action, i.e., when observing values-based behaviors in assessment center exercises. Alternatively, values-based questions can be included in an interview.
Personality assessments: While not directly assessing skills, personality assessments can provide valuable insights into a candidate’s work style, preferences and potential cultural fit within the organization.
Benefits of Skills-Based Assessments
Embracing skills-based assessment helps you move beyond the limitations of evaluating based on past experience to focus on present potential. Here are some of the benefits:
Delivering Value to Candidates
Skills assessments should provide clear value to candidates as well as the organisation:
Creates Transparency for the Candidate When the assessment outputs feed directly into the interview process, the candidate has a more personalized experience, making the interview feel more collaborative. Plus, candidates see how their effort during the assessment center connects to the actual role.
Provides an Opportunity for Development Skills assessments can become a career development tool. Even if the candidate doesn’t get the job, they gain visibility into their skills gaps and useful insight into building their skills for the future.
Delivering Value to Employers
Skills-based assessments also offer several advantages to employers over old evaluation methods:
Better Prediction of Performance Skills-based assessments provide better insight into on-the-job capabilities than education or experience alone, creating evidence-based, less biased hiring decisions.
Creates Wider Talent Pools Assessing for skills uncovers capable candidates regardless of their background, helping you tap into talent you would have otherwise overlooked.
Facilitates Internal Mobility Skill assessments aren’t just for recruiting. They can assist with identifying reskilling needs in your existing workforce, driving internal mobility and increasing retention.
Data-Driven Decisions Leveraging data from your skills assessment allows for analyzing gaps, workforce planning and building career pathing and development programs.
Making the Shift to a Skills-Based Assessment Strategy
While the benefits are clear, many organizations struggle with how to effectively implement skills-based assessment. The following section outlines key steps and considerations for successfully integrating assessments into your hiring process. From identifying critical skills for each role to selecting appropriate assessment tools and training hiring managers, these guidelines will help your organization make a smooth and effective transition to skills-based hiring.
1. Create Stakeholder Buy-In
The first step in moving toward skills-based assessments is communicating with hiring managers and leadership the “why” behind skills assessments and how they benefit candidates and the business. This will help you down the line when it comes to adoption of skills-first evaluation amongst hiring manager and recruiters. Make sure you address any concerns around changes to legacy processes and discuss ways to integrate skills data into hiring workflows and systems.
2. Define Your Desired Skills and Competencies
To effectively implement talent assessments in a skills-based hiring strategy, organizations must first clearly define the desired skills and competencies your business is looking for. Skills-based assessments can be implemented at different levels:
Role-Specific: Assessments directly tailored to the particular skills profile needed for success in a given job. Candidates are measured against a target skills benchmark.
Organization-Wide: A broader evaluation of a candidate’s skills compared to the general abilities the company needs in its workforce. This enables skills mapping and planning beyond just filling an immediate role. This is a more strategic approach for organizations already comfortable with a skills-based approach, as all roles in the organization require mapping against a full set of potential competencies.
This process should involve input from hiring managers, current and past successful employees and other stakeholders to ensure a comprehensive understanding of each role’s requirements.
3. Choose the Appropriate Assessment Tools
With the desired skills and competencies identified, you can then select the appropriate assessment tools that best measure those abilities. This may involve implementing off-the-shelf assessments, developing custom assessments or a combination of both. There are many tools to choose from, so to avoid being overwhelmed, consider engaging a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) partner. PeopleScout’s assessment team features assessment psychologists that specialize in helping organizations determine the right tools for their talent program.
4. Facilitate Change Management
Once you’ve put skills-based assessments into practice, make sure you have training in place on the interpretation of your skills-based assessments output and how hiring managers should use this in their hiring decisions. You should also capture and share data with hiring managers and leadership to show the benefits of the change.
Skills-Based Assessment & The Future of Work
The accelerating pace of technological change means organizations can no longer rely on backward-looking education and experience signals alone to build teams. In the decades ahead, skills will only become more central in attracting, developing and deploying talent.
An experienced RPO partner can be instrumental in helping organizations transition to and optimize skills-based assessments. RPO providers can help you identify the most relevant assessment tools for specific roles, integrate these seamlessly into your hiring process, and train internal teams on interpreting assessment results and using them effectively in hiring decisions. With an RPO partner, organizations can more efficiently adopt skills-based hiring practices, building strategic advantage in navigating the future of work.
Overcoming Healthcare Talent Shortage with Tech-Powered Direct Sourcing
An Australian radiology network sought PeopleScout’s Direct Sourcing solution after two acquisitions expanded their geographical footprint, making it increasingly difficult to fill critical skilled healthcare roles amidst a talent shortage and an imbalanced distribution of practitioners across regions.
401roles filled in just 5 months
112roles filled in remote locations
83%engagement rate on doctor campaign
Situation
This Australian radiology network operates in 270 clinics, employs over 350 doctors and 4,000 staff and performs over six million patient procedures a year, making them one of the largest medical imaging providers in the world. The organization needed to hire high-volume, critical healthcare roles across both metropolitan and regional locations, but they were struggling because of the talent shortage across their newly expanded regional footprint. In addition to the unique talent challenges facing the healthcare sector globally—including employee burnout, widening skills gaps and rising demand among the aging population—the diagnostic imaging sector in Australia faces the additional challenge of ensuring staff distribution across metropolitan, regional and rural areas is proportionate to the population. Historically, most radiology workers have resided in metropolitan areas, creating a gap in rural locations.
Prior to engaging PeopleScout, the client used disparate, short-term solutions and lacked a single view of the skills within their existing workforce. They did not have a talent technology platform, but instead managed requisitions and candidate outreach efforts using Excel spreadsheets. Our team developed a Direct Sourcing solution to help the client overcome the healthcare talent shortage and meet their workforce goals in all locations.
Solution
PeopleScout augmented the internal recruitment team with Direct Sourcing for both contingent and permanent roles ranging from medical receptionists to radiographers, sonographers to IT personnel, by developing and implementing 360-degree talent sourcing and engagement strategy that included:
Multi-Channel Sourcing: We deployed Smart Search, an Affinix™ tool that simultaneously scours multiple external databases, capturing and saving profiles that match desired skills and experience.
AI-Powered Talent Rediscovery: Using artificial intelligence, we matched job descriptions to all candidates in the platform, generating a list of recommended candidates that were scored for suitability, based on industry experience, skills, previous job titles and management experience.
Cutting-Edge Recruitment Marketing: Leveraging Affinix’s capabilities, we built an internal career site and external job portal. These engagement hubs allowed employees and candidates to explore openings, learn about different roles or submit expression of interest forms for hard-to-fill positions.
Sophisticated Talent Nurturing: Candidates were segmented into talent pools by role and region, then added to customized, automated nurture campaigns. This allowed our client to engage or re-engage with active and passive candidates, alumni and referrals effectively.
Data-Driven Insights: Custom Affinix dashboards provided real-time insights on the most active candidates, enabling the team to build automated drip campaigns that kept jobseekers engaged and interested.
Results
The impact of our tech-powered Direct Sourcing solution was swift and substantial. In the first five months following program launch, PeopleScout filled 401 roles for the radiology network across 33 locations, including every state and territory where the organization operates.
Some campaign messaging was role-specific—the campaign targeting 800 doctors had an engagement rate over 80%.
Other messages focused on the benefits of working in the more remote locations, highlighting the “perfect combination of a vibrant city life in a rural setting.” Of the roles filled, 112 were within these regional locations, where recruitment had historically been more difficult.
At a Glance
COMPANY Radiology network
INDUSTRY Healthcare
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Total Talent, Affinix
LOCATIONS 33 locations across Australia and New Zealand
The evolution of remote work has resulted in the growth of the gig economy and the blurring of lines between full-time and temporary employment. Workers who traditionally seek full-time employment are increasingly willing to take up temporary gigs—and vice versa. Organizations that create and nurture blended talent pools of both permanent and contingent workers can be more intentional with workforce planning to address skills gaps and diversity goals. Enter direct sourcing—a game-changing strategy that’s reshaping how companies approach talent acquisition.
By integrating direct sourcing into your total talent acquisition strategy, you can turn these talent pools into your strongest channel for growing your workforce, bringing forward pre-engaged talent. This results in faster hiring and improves overall organizational productivity. With direct sourcing, you can uncover hidden talent and gain a competitive edge in attracting top-tier candidates.
But what is direct sourcing, and why should talent acquisition leaders pay attention? In this article, we’ll delve into the importance of direct sourcing, it’s role in total talent management, its benefits, and the crucial role of technology in a direct sourcing solution.
What is Direct Sourcing?
First things first, what is direct sourcing anyway? Direct sourcing is a recruitment approach that leverages an organization’s employer brand and existing talent database to build and manage talent pools for both permanent and contingent positions. This method allows organizations to engage directly with potential hires, including former employees, retirees, referrals, interns, and even “silver medalists” and candidates who were runners-up in previous hiring processes. Unlike traditional methods that rely heavily on staffing agencies, direct sourcing creates a pipeline of freelance, temporary and permanent talent, reducing costs, improving hiring efficiency and allowing employers to take control of their hiring needs.
At its core, direct sourcing involves:
Utilizing your employer brand to attract talent
Creating and managing exclusive talent pools
Proactively engaging with potential candidates
Direct Sourcing: The First Step to Total Talent Acquisition?
According to Everest Group, 46% of enterprises are actively exploring ways to combine approaches for contingent and permanent talent acquisition management, and 74% see direct sourcing as the way to do it. By sharing people, processes and technology across vacancy types through direct sourcing, organizations gain efficiency and get closer to total workforce management.
Partners like PeopleScout excel at direct sourcing, as their specialty lies in seamlessly integrating with client teams, leveraging the client’s employer brand to attract top talent. Plus, with a partner, you gain access to specialized technology for managing and curating talent pools, ensuring a streamlined and efficient process while still maintaining the benefits of direct engagement with potential hires.
The Benefits of Direct Sourcing
Direct sourcing offers numerous benefits that are driving its adoption among forward-thinking organizations. Let’s explore the top advantages:
Faster Hiring Cycles: With always-on talent pools, direct sourcing can significantly reduce time-to-hire. By eliminating the need for a staffing agency and leveraging candidates who already exist in the ATS and CRM (and are familiar with your employer brand), direct sourcing puts engaged candidates at your fingertips. Having regular access to qualified candidates, referrals and former employees allows you to easily adjust to changing workforce needs.
Greater Cost Savings: Direct sourcing can significantly reduce recruitment costs by minimizing reliance on staffing agencies and their associated fees. An RPO partner who can offer AI-powered sourcing and innovative ways to ensure smarter media spend can reduce your costs and maximize your ROI for direct sourcing.
Higher Quality of Candidates: By leveraging your employer brand and creating curated talent pools, direct sourcing allows you to attract higher-quality candidates who are better aligned with your organization’s culture and needs. Through personalized engagement with candidates, RPO providers can gain a deeper understanding of their skills, experiences and motivations. Additionally, direct sourcing allows companies to build lasting relationships with top talent, creating a talent pool that can be tapped for future openings.
Enhanced Candidate Experience: Direct sourcing meansmore personalized and human interactions, which improves the candidate experience. By engaging proactively with potential hires, you can provide a smoother, more informative process that reflects positively on your brand.
Employer Brand Attraction: In a direct sourcing engagement, your RPO partner is an extension of your team, transforming your employer brand into a powerful tool in attracting top contingent and permanent talent. Direct sourcing allows you to showcase your company culture, values and opportunities through relevant and engaging touchpoints, helping you become an employer of choice.
Access to Data & Insights: With extensive experience across job families and regions, RPOs are well suited to evaluate your unique recruitment metrics against market trends to enable data-driven decision making for your direct souring program. Detailed analytics help decode top talent behaviors and predict cultural fit, willingness to change companies and future tenure potential to improve hiring speed and accuracy over time.
Improved Diversity: The targeted nature of direct sourcing means you can identify, select and engage candidates from various audiences to meet diversity goals.
Improved Hiring Manager Experience: Direct sourcing provides hiring managers with better access to high-quality and diverse talent pools, freeing them up to focus on leading their teams instead of recruiting.
The Role of Technology in Direct Sourcing
While the concept of direct sourcing is powerful on its own, technology unlocks its true potential. Modern direct sourcing solutions leverage AI, multi-channel sourcing, communication automation and analytics to supercharge the approach.
When deciding on a direct sourcing solution, consider the following technologies:
AI and Machine Learning: These technologies enable superior skills matching, connecting the right candidates with the right opportunities more efficiently than ever before. PeopleScout Direct Sourcing helps you rediscover candidates who are already in your applicant tracking system (ATS) with the use of AI. Affinix™, our proprietary talent acquisition suite, compares your job description against profiles in your database and identifies a list of the best candidates—whether they’re previous applicants, individuals who have filled out an expression of interest form for the role, or silver/bronze medalists from previous requisitions. You receive a weighted role suitability score for each candidate (based on previous job titles and experience, skills profile, and management experience) along with a written summary. Your hiring manager can then determine which candidates they want to pursue immediately, and which to add to a talent pool, where they’ll receive additional outreach before being invited to apply.
Smart Search: In addition to your existing ATS, consider a direct sourcing solution that enables you to search across multiple external talent databases—such as LinkedIn and Indeed—simultaneously and save relevant candidate profiles into your own database. This helps you beat your competitors to hard-to-find talent and source more efficiently with a seamless experience for your hiring managers. AI can be applied to these candidates as well to identify strong candidates—passive or active, known or new to you—within seconds of opening a new job requisition.
Multi-Channel Sourcing: To truly capitalize on your employer brand with your direct sourcing program, a multi-channel approach that leverages recruitment marketing to reach top talent is crucial. This includes custom career site and microsite development, for both internal and external job portals, expression of interest forms and programmatic advertising. This holistic approach will re-engage talent and excite them about your opportunities.
Personalization at Scale: Your direct sourcing solution should feature recruitment marketing technology that helps you develop a series of automated targeted communication touchpoints to engage or re-engage with passive candidates, silver/bronze medalists, contractors, alumni and referrals. Personalized emails and automated drip campaigns will keep your brand top-of-mind. Use analytics from communication and nurture campaigns to access insight into which candidates are engaging most with your content and whether the content you’re distributing resonates with the candidate pool.
Data-Driven Insights: For your direct sourcing program, insist on robust reporting and analytics capabilities. However, according to Everest Group, 52% of organizations who are considering direct sourcing cite the lack of technology integration between permanent and contingent tools as a challenge they are currently facing or anticipate facing. Integrating your existing VMS and ATS into one analytics platform is a must for total talent management in order to gain insight into both your permanent and contingent openings.
Conclusion
As the world of work continues to evolve, direct sourcing is poised to play an increasingly important role for organizations aiming to streamline their total talent acquisition processes and attract the best candidates.
As you consider implementing direct sourcing in your organization, remember that while the human touch remains invaluable, technology is a crucial enabler. Industry leading direct sourcing solutions are AI-powered, combining cutting-edge technology with expert talent curation and engagement strategies.
By embracing this approach, organizations can position themselves at the forefront of talent acquisition innovation, ready to attract and engage the best contingent and permanent talent in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Early careers recruitment is undergoing a seismic shift as Generation Z enters the workforce en masse. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all early careers hiring strategies. Gen Zers aren’t shy about demanding more—more purpose, more flexibility, and more growth opportunities. Organizations who can navigate these expectations will win the hearts of Gen Z in the workplace.
Meeting these expectations isn’t just about filling entry-level positions; it’s about future-proofing your organization. In this new landscape, companies that crack the code of Gen Z recruitment will gain a significant competitive edge. Let’s explore some of Gen Z’s expectations and ways you can revolutionize your early careers recruitment to attract and retain the brightest minds.
Consumer-Like Experiences in Early Careers Recruitment
This generation and mobile devices go hand-in-hand—literally. They’re accustomed to digital consumer brand experiences delivered through online platforms and mobile apps.
Organizations that present tech-powered experiences throughout their recruitment process will get ahead with Gen Z. Consider incorporating:
Mobile-enabled application processes with personalized and automated workflows
Peer-driven recruitment content on socials
Booking and confirming interviews via text message
Tailored email campaigns and meaningful communications that provide hints and tips and explain timelines clearly
However, just because they’re digital-first, doesn’t mean Gen Zers don’t appreciate a human touch, so personalization is a must-have with regular check-ins from human recruiters to ease anxiety and build connection.
Authentic Storytelling
Gen Z job seekers trust employees three times more than the company to provide credible information on what it’s like to work there. They want to hear from their peers, real people who can share their lived experiences in the program or at your organization. Focus on employee generated content rather than highly staged and polished marketing content.
Featuring existing employees as brand ambassadors in early careers attraction content will help build trust and authenticity. Plus, it will help candidates see themselves in the role.
Opportunity to Demonstrate Potential
When it comes to early careers talent, their lack of experience makes it hard for employers to differentiate between candidates using résumés and CVs alone. Using a CV-blind approach, where only the critical requirements are assessed, helps to reduce unconscious bias and level the playing field.
Emerging talent tends to struggle with competency-based questions and may have difficulty understanding how their studies could apply to a given role. And often, those candidates excelling in competency-based questions have utilized generative AI tools like Chat GPT or coaching from their careers service—which can result in an inauthentic assessment of the individual.
Struggling to give evidence of a skill or behavior (i.e., competency questions, “tell me about a time when…”) when there is a lack of experience, doesn’t mean there is a lack of the potential. Leveraging realistic job previews, skills-based assessments or job simulations and situational-based interview questions gives emerging talent a feel for the job by showing them a snapshot of the real-life, day-to-day tasks of the role and the working environment. They are effective screening tools, giving candidates an opportunity to show how they might perform and demonstrate their potential. This helps level the playing field, and it can reduce early attrition by setting the right expectations from the start.
Receiving & Giving Feedback
What Gen Z lacks in experience, they make up for in enthusiasm. They’re keen to learn and grow and seek feedback in everything they do. While a candidate may or may not receive a job offer, feedback that they can use as they move forward in their career is the next-best outcome.
Often, candidates may receive a generic email or—even worse—no communication at all. When they’ve invested a considerable amount of time and effort into an organization, no feedback can leave a bad taste. At every stage, taking the time to provide personalized feedback gives candidates actionable steps that they can take going forward in the process, or if they’ve been rejected, that they can use to apply to your company again in the future. If the candidate was a close match, the feedback you provide could help them become the ideal candidate in your next cohort.
Additionally, with their consumer experience, Gen Z are keen to give feedback. In the absence of a mechanism for feedback, disgruntled candidates can take to social media and student forums to share their experiences and damage your employer brand. Instead, ask for feedback via a candidate experience survey like a Net Promoters Score (NPS) survey, which will allow you to measure your candidate experience and act on the feedback. In addition, monitor your social media platforms and forums and respond to demonstrate that you’re listening and taking it seriously. You may even consider offering candidates a means of contact via a dedicated email inbox and respond to any feedback you receive in a meaningful way.
Leveraging RPO Expertise for Early Careers Recruitment
Adapting your early careers recruitment to meet Gen Z’s expectations can be a complex undertaking, but you don’t have to go it alone. An experienced recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner can be instrumental in revolutionizing your approach. These specialists bring a wealth of knowledge about the latest recruitment trends, technologies and Gen Z preferences. An early careers talent solution can help you redesign your recruitment processes, craft compelling employer branding strategies and implement cutting-edge assessment techniques that resonate with emerging talent. Moreover, an RPO partner can provide the scalability and flexibility needed to handle fluctuating recruitment volumes, ensuring you’re always ready to capture top Gen Z talent.
By leveraging an RPO provider’s expertise, you can quickly transform your early careers recruitment program into a powerhouse that not only attracts Gen Z candidates but also sets the stage for building a pipeline of talent that will drive your company’s future success. The organizations that adapt now will reap the rewards of a diverse, skilled and motivated workforce for years to come.
Navigating the Gen Z Era: Insights for Effective Early Careers Recruitment
The future of work isn’t coming—it’s already here, and it’s powered by Generation Z.
Born into a world of uncertainty, Gen Z isn’t just adapting—they’re rewriting the rules. These digital natives are bringing fresh perspectives, unmatched tech-fluency and a hunger for meaningful work. But they’re also demanding authenticity, flexibility and a real commitment to social impact.
Can your organization keep up?
From TikTok-worthy employer branding to creating a workplace that balances purpose with work-life harmony, this ebook, Navigating the Gen Z Era: Insights for Effective Early Careers Recruitment, is your roadmap to successfully recruiting and retaining the Gen Z powerhouse.
In this ebook, you’ll discover:
What makes Gen Z tick: Understand their unique values and career expectations
Why your outdated recruitment tactics are falling flat with this generation
Strategies to align your early careers program with Gen Z’s values and expectations
Download your copy today for expert tips for reimagining your early career recruitment program to become a Gen Z magnet.
With top talent as elusive as ever, finding and attracting exceptional candidates has become increasingly challenging. Talent sourcing has emerged as a critical function in addressing an organization’s workforce needs, regardless of company size or industry. From start-ups to global enterprises, implementing effective talent sourcing strategies is essential for staying ahead in the race for top-tier professionals and ultimately driving organizational success.
This article will guide you through talent sourcing, from understanding its importance to overcoming common challenges. We will explore how outsourcing can significantly improve your talent sourcing outcomes.
What is Talent Sourcing?
So, what is talent sourcing exactly? It involves the proactive identification and attraction of qualified candidates for specific roles within an organization through various channels such as job boards, social media platforms, professional networks and talent databases. By proactively engaging with potential candidates, talent sourcing helps build a strong pipeline.
The key objectives of talent sourcing are:
Identifying high-potential candidates who aren’t actively job hunting
Creating a talent pipeline for future needs
Improving the quality and diversity of your candidate pool
Reducing time-to-hire and cost-per-hire
In a talent market in which skilled professionals are in high demand, talent sourcing is a must in order to engage with qualified talent.
Talent Sourcing vs Recruiting
Now, before you start confusing talent sourcing with its cousin recruitment, let’s clarify the difference. Traditional recruitment often relies on posting job ads and waiting for applicants. In contrast, talent sourcing involves actively searching for candidates through various channels such as social media, professional networks and online platforms. Talent sourcing emphasizes relationship building and engagement rather than merely relying on job postings.
Challenges in Talent Sourcing
Talent sourcing can present various challenges for organizations looking to attract and hire top talent. You’re up against some formidable obstacles:
Competition for top talent: One common obstacle in talent sourcing is the competition for qualified candidates. For example, tech and digital skills are in demand across all industries, not just high-tech firms.
Skill shortages: It can be challenging to find candidates with the specific skills and experience required for the job, particularly if it’s a niche role or in a remote area.
Managing diversity and inclusion: DE&I in talent sourcing is another important aspect to consider. Many organizations struggle to engage a diverse candidate pool and stay aligned with their recruitment goals.
Maintaining compliance: Organizations must ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations. This includes adhering to equal employment opportunity (EEO) laws and maintaining data privacy and protection.
By implementing the right strategies, organizations can overcome talent sourcing challenges and ensure they are attracting the best candidates for their roles.
Benefits of Shifting Talent Sourcing to an RPO Partner
Now, here’s where things get interesting. What if I told you there’s a secret weapon that can help you get ahead? Enter your Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) partner! No longer just for long-term recruitment engagement, RPO offers modular recruiting solutions that provide the agility and expertise to turbocharge your hiring process.
Here are some of the benefits you can experience:
Scalability: Need to hire 10 engineers this month and 100 next month? RPOs can flex up and down to meet your changing needs fast—and you don’t have to hire any more internal recruiters to make it happen.
Talent pooling. Rather than relying solely on incoming applications, RPO provides connected talent sourcers who focus on proactive engagement with candidates through social media platforms, industry-specific job boards and professional networks. This helps you tap into a wider pool of candidates, including passive job seekers who may not be actively looking for new opportunities. Plus, we help our clients to build relationships with candidates over time, nurturing them until the right opportunity arises. You find the best fit for a position and free up your internal team to focus on creating a brilliant candidate and hiring manager experience.
Rapid access to the latest technologies: RPOs are tech-savvy—always up to date with the latest tech. For example, our AI-powered sourcing tool in Affinix™ searches millions of candidate profiles for your requirements in minutes. At PeopleScout, we can also provide recruitment technologies like CRM, ATS, video interview tools, assessment platforms and analytics.
Talent market insights: With the finger on the pulse of the talent market, RPOs can offer invaluable market feedback to benchmark your talent profiles and refine your talent strategy.
Showcase your employer brand: Outsourcing your talent sourcing significantly contributes to your employer brand by highlighting your unique employee value proposition (EVP). An RPO partner can showcase the benefits and perks of working for your organization, such as career development opportunities, flexible work arrangements and company culture.
Maximize diversity: By implementing inclusive hiring practices and leveraging diverse recruitment sources, an RPO partner actively seeks diverse talent. With experience across regions and industries, RPOs have access to an immense pool of professionals from varied backgrounds.
Prioritize compliance: It is crucial to understand the legal framework surrounding talent sourcing to mitigate potential risks or legal issues. Partnering with a trusted talent partner can help ensure compliance and minimize legal risks in all the areas you’re hiring.
Effective talent sourcing isn’t just about filling seats—it’s about discovering stars to light up your organization. Whether you’re doing it in-house or partnering with an RPO provider, investing in strong talent sourcing strategies will fuel your company’s future growth.
PeopleScout Talent Sourcing provides the perfect way to boost your recruitment resources, engage with passive candidates and reach your hiring goals faster. Our sourcers act as an extension of your organization’s recruitment team—finding high quality talent, personally engaging them and converting them into applicants. Candidates get a great experience. You get a short or long list of pre-qualified, genuinely enthusiastic applicants ready for interview or assessment.
Talent Sourcing Use Cases
Wondering how you could benefit from outsourcing talent sourcing? Here are some real-world scenarios where we supported clients through our Talent Sourcing solution.
The Niche Specialist
Situation
As a leader in higher education in the UK, a British university was seeking a niche role for their student casework team. Battling a tiny talent pool in their local area, they tried recruiting a Deputy Head of Student Casework on two occasions with no success. The client turned to PeopleScout to help them find the right hire with our Talent Sourcing solution.
Solution
Our strategy targeted individuals who had:
Previous management experience
Experience working within higher education including complex student casework
Knowledge of academic and statutory framework guidelines
With only three other universities nearby, we knew our talent pool would be limited in the immediate proximity for this office-based role. So, we extended our search across the entire UK to find candidates who would consider relocating.
Results
71 candidates identified
46% engagement rate (well above the industry average of 18% to 25%)
“We are very pleased indeed! Very interesting that all candidates said they weren’t actively looking for a new role, so clearly, we needed to work with PeopleScout.”
Client Feedback
The Great Expansion
Situation
The London Borough of Hounslow, a local government agency, needed to source candidates that shared their values and vision as part of delivering their new Corporate Plan. This large-scale program initially incorporated 19 areas, with more to come in future iterations of the plan. They partnered with PeopleScout for a Talent Sourcing engagement that focused initially on six key job profiles, hiring between 35 and 40 individuals for the corporate Project Management Office (PMO) and the Service Design and Transformation teams.
Solution
Public sector recruitment is often challenging due to competition from other sectors. Because of this, we engaged passive candidates to raise Hounslow’s profile in the market and increase diversity within the talent pools. Our focus was on building brand awareness amongst candidates with backgrounds that matched these niche roles.
We leveraged our Affinix talent acquisition suite to drive better decisions, to track and monitor the client’s DE&I agenda and to provide a mobile-first candidate experience. Throughout the project, we presented market feedback data and hiring metrics through bespoke dashboards.
Results
87% offer acceptance rate
65% of candidates hired identified as non-white, boosting diversity outcomes
2:1 to interview-to-hire, exceeding the average of 3:1
“PeopleScout were different to other providers I’ve worked with before. What really set them apart is the time they spent listening and understanding what the roles were and what type of people we wanted. The result is that we trusted PeopleScout’s shortlisted candidates, and we filled our roles quickly with talent that met our quality expectations.”
Mike Burch, Head of Service Design and Transformation Programmes, London Borough of Hounslow
Talent Sourcing by PeopleScout
In the grand talent show that is the job market, talent acquisition teams are not just judges—they’re talent scouts, coaches, and sometimes, even magicians, expected to pull perfect candidates out of thin air. Even the best talent acquisition teams need a little extra support to reach their goals! If you’re feeling overwhelmed, PeopleScout is standing by, ready to be your Talent Sourcing ally.
By Patti Woods, Sr. Implementation Training Manager, & Chad Getchell, Director of Technical Solutions Architecture & Tech Implementation
Ready or not, AI is coming for the recruiting world. A whopping 81% of HR leaders are already exploring or implementing AI in their processes according to Gartner. That’s a lot of companies jumping on the train with AI for recruiting. And there’s a good reason for it—AI has the potential to make your talent acquisition team’s jobs easier by taking those mundane, repetitive tasks off their plate.
However, not everyone is as excited. We hear from many clients who are overwhelmed with the combination of how powerful these tools are and the ethical and legal considerations that they need to keep in mind while still getting the benefits.
Are you ready to jump on the AI train? Or are you still feeling unsure? Don’t worry, we’re here to cut through the hype and talk about the practicalities of implementing AI in recruiting.
AI for Recruiting: What it Is and What it Isn’t
Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that can perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence. AI can “learn” complex tasks without being explicitly programmed to do them. AI includes the sub-fields of machine learning, speech and natural language processing and robotic process automation.
However, most definitions of AI don’t include the words “ethical” and “responsible.” Because AI lacks emotions, morals, empathy, compassion, historical context and more—things humans are great at. So, for anyone who is concerned about AI taking over their jobs—while we can’t guarantee this won’t happen someday—we want to remind you that humans have an important role to play, acting as the ethical and responsible parties making decisions throughout the recruitment process.
Some other limitations of AI include:
Biased Algorithms: If AI models are trained on biased or incomplete data sets, they can unintentionally perpetuate inequality. It’s important to keep an eye on the outcomes of AI-enabled résumé or CV sifting or sourcing to ensure there’s no bias present.
Lack of Accuracy: Generative AI (GAI) tools, like ChatGPT, are prone to making up statistics and sources—known as hallucinating. Human review is crucial when leveraging GAI tools for creating content and communications.
Data Privacy Issues: Collecting and analyzing extensive candidate information required by AI systems can raise concerns around consent, data protection and ethical usage. Work with your legal and compliance teams to ensure you’re in line with the legal and regulatory requirements in all the areas where you’re hiring.
Disproportionate Impact: Certain demographic groups face higher exposure to the potential harms of AI in recruitment. This can happen because lower income communities often lack access to digital tools which can create an adverse impact during the recruitment process when technology is in place. Analyzing recruitment data, like application and pass rates, will help to identify if any groups or individuals have been adversely impacted.
AI + Humans: The Recruitment Dream Team
Having humans as reviewers and approvers following AI-enabled stages of the recruitment process will mitigate risks that come from these limitations. In fact, AI should not be making decisions on behalf of a recruiter. While AI is great at repetitive tasks, it lacks that special something that only humans possess—context, empathy, ethics and good ol’ common sense. Your recruiters must use their moral compass to make sure the interests of candidates and your company are protected. It’s a critical role, no matter where AI is being used in the process.
AI is just another tool in your belt, but it has the power to elevate the recruiter’s role. It’s about using AI to maximize efficiency, so they can really focus on the human touchpoints that are crucial to the candidate experience. It also lets recruiters spend more time focusing on the parts of the job that are more relational, impactful and enjoyable, making them happier in their roles.
Job satisfaction goes up. Turnover goes down. You get the best of both worlds—the efficiency and computational power of AI that empowers better relationship-building, trust-earning and ethical-hiring. They’re a perfect pair!
Collaboration is Crucial
If you’re feeling intimidated by launching a new AI tool, remember you don’t have to go it alone—and shouldn’t. Your friends in legal, compliance and IT can ensure you’re staying on the straight and narrow. With legal covering your back, compliance double checking everything, IT implementing the solutions, and your recruiting team actually putting it all into practice, teamwork is essential for AI to work.
Consulting with your legal team and external partners is a critical move to ensure you’re being appropriately transparent without overwhelming candidates. They’ll help you navigate those tricky ethical waters and put guardrails in place to make sure you’re compliant with relevant laws and regulations.
Getting Started with AI for Recruiting
If there’s one thing that we want to make sure is crystal clear about our perspective, it is that you can’t take a blanket approach to implementing an AI-based solution. This is why being slow to adoption is totally okay. So, if you feel like you’re jumping in late, you are not. There’s a lot on the line and adoption needs to be carefully vetted, tested and communicated before you go for it.
The key to adopting AI is taking it slow, testing the waters with a pilot and controlled rollout. A great way to begin could be using AI for sourcing support, reviewing that first round of résumés or CVs, or even drafting template communications for your team. Easy wins like this let you get a feel for how AI can simplify your processes without adding too much risk.
While every project is different, when helping clients, we follow this basic five step process for implementing an AI tool:
Identify: Identify the business problem you want to solve or the business practices you want to improve with AI. It could be speeding up the first-round review of résumés or applications. It could be drafting communication templates for a team to use. It’s also imperative at this stage to define what a successful outcome looks like.
Plan: Research available AI tools that can solve your business problem and plan the journey to get started. This should include what metrics you will use to measure success. It’s important at this stage to include representatives from across the business from teams like HR, talent acquisition, IT, legal, compliance, department heads or hiring managers, etc.
Manage Risks: Evaluate the risks that may pop up for all applicable groups and create a plan to address them directly.
Pilot: Start with a small pilot user group and timeline. This might be a particular job family or location. How long do you want the pilot to last? What are the expected results? What threshold must be met for you to say, “OK, the pilot went well. Let’s expand.”? Address issues and iterate as you go until all your stakeholders are comfortable with moving forward.
Manage Change: Here is where you plan to scale your new AI tool and process to more parts of your recruitment program. Develop training materials on how to use the AI tool, the new process and expectations so everyone understands their role—whether they’re a recruiter, hiring manager, IT support or beyond. It’s about putting in place intentional, consistent accountability.
It doesn’t end there. There really isn’t a finish line with AI, or any other technology for that matter. Make sure that you are evaluating on an ongoing basis and measuring progress. It’s an ongoing exercise to ensure you’re finding risks, mitigating them and maximizing the value of your investment.
An RPO Partner Can Help You Navigate AI for Recruiting
As a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner and trusted talent advisor to our clients, we help companies implement AI-enhanced hiring with less disruption and a faster return on investment. PeopleScout has experience implementing recruitment tech like AI software, advising on the best options for your needs, integration requirements, data needs, ethical usage, and workflow design. We do our due diligence with every client to make sure that we’re looking for the right way to embrace any technology, including AI, so that it benefits them based on their unique needs.
If you’re interested in RPO, look for a partner that is moving at your speed when it comes to AI in recruiting. AI solutions are meant to augment—not replace—human decisions in recruitment. Cultivating ethical and responsible usage of AI for recruiting is key when it comes to delivering real impact on talent acquisition.
The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal or other professional advice; instead, all information, content, and materials available in this article are for general information purposes only. Readers of this article should contact their attorney or legal advisor to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter. No reader of this article should act or refrain from acting on the basis of information in this article without first seeking legal advice from counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. All liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this article are expressly disclaimed by PeopleScout, Inc.. The content in this article is provided “as-is”, and no representations are made by PeopleScout that the content is error-free.
Supporting Annual Graduate Recruitment for a Government Agency
PeopleScout supports the assessment center for a UK government agency’s annual graduate recruitment campaign for policy advisors to ensure candidate quality and fairness.
3,500+applications assessed
140candidates supported in assessment centers
4weeks of assessment centers completed
Situation
This UK government agency runs an annual graduate recruitment campaign to hire quality early careers talent across their policy advisor team. They turned to PeopleScout to ensure this process remained consistent, fair and unbiased.
Solution
The PeopleScout talent assessment team supports the agency’s graduate recruitment program each year, continuously improving campaigns year-on-year.
Prior to the assessment center, PeopleScout organizes assessors to sift written exercises. Successful candidates then complete a bespoke Situational Judgement Test, which we designed specifically to assess how candidates would respond in true-to-life scenarios that employees will encounter in their roles at the agency. This sifts out approximately 30% of applicants who would be unlikely to succeed at the assessment center.
Candidate then complete the assessment center, for which we provide assessors. The assessment includes a variety of exercises like role plays, interviews and structured policy conversations. These are freshly designed by the client each year, and PeopleScout supports by reviewing the materials for consistency and best practice.
Our experienced assessment team provides an end-of-campaign analysis, adverse impact analysis and recommendations for continual improvement. For example, off the back of these recommendations, we worked collaboratively with our client to host the assessment centres through part of our Affinix technology suite to create a smoother candidate and assessor experience in their virtual assessment centers.
Results
For this annual graduate recruitment campaign, PeopleScout assessed 3,697 applications, with 140 people completing the assessment center over 4 weeks. Ultimately, 53 candidates went on to work for the agency.
At a Glance
COMPANY UK Government Agency
INDUSTRY Government & Public Sector
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory, Affinix
ANNUAL HIRES 50+ graduate policy advisors
ABOUT THE CLIENT This UK government agency employs over 3,000 civil servants.
