HRs have a diverse set of functions such as overlooking compensation and benefits, managing talent, recruiting, compliance, employee learning and upskilling, well being etc. Recruitment in itself is a complex multi-touchpoint process that starts with recruitment marketing (i.e building a brand to attract candidates) and ends onboarding selected candidates. The pipeline between these steps can be partitioned into two broad categories.
Sourcing
The first step of recruitment is to get a list of candidates to evaluate for a role. For companies that are sought-after or prestigious in their domain (for benefits or other reasons) receive a lot of interest from candidates on their careers page. This refers to inbound candidates. A better way of getting inbound candidates is to post the job on LinkedIn or other job boards and wait for candidates to apply. These sourcing platforms also allow you to find candidates by applying filters relevant for your jobs and then reaching out to these candidates. This set of candidates are outbound candidates. Note here that these candidates have not shown direct interest in your job so the response expected here is lower than inbound.
Thus the most widely known solutions for sourcing are job boards such as Naukri, Indeed, LinkedIn, Foundit etc. They have a large database of candidates from which you can find source candidates for almost every role out there.
What are some other solutions that fall under sourcing and how do they differentiate themselves?
Job boards targeting a segment - Job board for blue collar workers (Apna), job board for internships (Internshala), job board for startup jobs (Wellfound/Angellist, YC), job boards focusing only on tech talent (Cutshort, Param.ai, Dice.com, HackerRank, HackerEarth etc)
Other solutions I have encountered include sourcing candidates from their github contributions etc.
Assessment
Once you have the candidates the next part is to evaluate them to identity top candidates. Evaluating candidates can further be broken down into
The above process is very variable depending on the company. For tech roles, there is often a coding round before L2/L3 round. For senior roles in tech, there is a System Design round. Some companies give out assignments to complete (for example design roles) for screening.
In this bucket there are plethora of solutions in the market for – conducting coding rounds (HackerRank, HackerEarth etc.), conducting MCQ quizzes (TestGorilla, TestDome), audio/video recorded questions (Hirevue) or video interviews (Babblebots). Most of these platforms also include personality and aptitude assessment as part of their library.
These are not the only solutions and we’ll cover in more details the different solutions that exist in the market in the next post.
So which step is more important sourcing or assessment?
Depends on the company in context. Companies like Google or Microsoft receive millions of applications every year so they need not worry about sourcing. For them assessing candidates is very crucial (and they are willing to spend a lot of money on it). For companies not receiving inbound interest, sourcing becomes of utmost importance, afterall the quality of top candidates depends on the sourced pool and assessment only serves to discover the quality within the pool. (bad sourcing leads to bad top candidates). It also depends on the hiring budget or the role (which is related to the salary of the role). Tech roles have a higher budget, so companies will be willing to spend money on coding rounds (which are costly). For low-end salary roles, companies might not use any solution and resort to recruiters making calls and interviewing directly.