Direct Sourcing has tremendous potential to drive cost savings and deliver incredible outcomes, but there is some confusion about certain aspects.
Direct Sourcing refers to the process of building robust talent pipelines by accessing and engaging with your organization’s existing talent pools, as well as extending your reach into additional talent pools to find quality candidates. Many organizations also utilize their company brand to attract talent and build a talent community. It is currently estimated at around $1B of annual contingent labor spend. If you’re not familiar with how it works, read our introductory blog post on Direct Sourcing here.
Let’s start by debunking some common myths and misconceptions.
Myth 1 - Direct Sourcing will automatically save our business millions of dollars
The biggest allure of Direct Sourcing is its promise to deliver businesses tremendous cost savings post-implementation. While the savings are real, the path to receiving them is not straightforward and depends on multiple factors, including:
- The types of roles you hire for – The competitiveness of the market, going pay rates and availability of talent will determine the cost savings for each particular role.
- Whether the roles are repetitive or similar in nature – The more similar roles are, the bigger boost you’ll receive from existing talent pools or from building talent pipelines.
- Whether your biggest hiring needs are located in a few geographies or spread out – Consolidated geographies will enable more use of your talent pipelines.
- The volume of positions you need to hire
- The availability of talent for your top hiring needs
Each situation is unique, and the eventual cost savings are dependent on the amount of efficiencies that can be gained by leveraging existing and external talent pools.
Myth 2 - It requires zero investment
There are ways to structure your Direct Sourcing initiative to minimize the upfront investment. But in reality, it requires investments of time and energy to make it successful. There are costs associated with the technology solution, sourcing channels, and the team members responsible for sourcing, curation, and hiring. Although these costs can be added to the mark-up rate, the speed of ROI for the solution directly depends on the amount of investment your business is willing to commit upfront. Direct Sourcing also includes an element of change management for processes relating to contingent hiring.
Myth 3 - Awesome technology is what makes Direct Sourcing possible
Direct Sourcing is not just technology dependent, but people dependent as well. A successful strategy requires experienced professionals that know how to leverage technology to fill open jobs. It is important to note that technology alone cannot ensure an exceptional candidate experience. You need team members that have a great attitude and are customer service oriented to make the hiring process one that candidates enjoy and want to engage in. Only a combined high-tech and high-touch approach can make this successful.
Myth 4 - It's better done in-house, without the help of external vendors
Very often, Direct Sourcing is touted as an internal recruitment strategy where managers can source talent internally, rather than relying on a third-party or intermediary such as a consulting or staffing company to fill talent needs.
This is possible as long as you have the following:
- Ample access to talent pools (internal and external)
- Ability to engage and nurture talent through email, phone and text
- Ability to leverage your brand for talent attraction and engagement
- Access to technology that can power your capabilities
- Access to a team of sourcers, recruiters and curators
Unfortunately, most businesses lack the technology and resources to effectively implement this strategy. In fact, working with a Managed Service Provider that understands your business’ culture and hiring needs simplifies the process and reduces costs plus overall contingent spend.
Myth 5 - Direct Sourcing will fulfill 100% of our open positions
Having access to millions of candidates in your talent pools doesn’t guarantee a high fulfillment rate. The data residing in your various internal talent pool sources are likely to be static and require refreshment by engaging and nurturing the talent.
Moreover, the ease at which open positions can be filled depends on the job details, volumes, geographies, availability of talent, talent interest in your brand, and more. The more your talent pools resemble the needs of your hiring program, the more you’ll be able to reap the rewards. High fulfillment rates happen over time. On average, you can expect 20-30% fulfillment in specific job categories during the first year with the ability to scale that to over 50-80% in 5 years.
Myth 6 - It delivers great outcomes quickly
Direct Sourcing is still in the early days of market penetration and requires time to be understood and evaluated. For businesses looking to adopt a Direct Sourcing strategy, it’s best to take a ‘crawl, walk and run’ approach.
The first step is to define the problem to be solved via Direct Sourcing.This can be done by conducting an assessment and running a pilot to identify your hiring needs and goals. Following the evaluation process, businesses can use an agile and iterative approach that allows them to improve and tweak the solution along the way, allowing them to utilize Direct Sourcing in specific areas where they get the best ROI and results.
Should You Make Investments Right Now?
Direct Sourcing has become the current hot-topic in the global staffing industry with businesses, suppliers, service providers, and tech providers starting to realize its potential value. Cost reduction is what drives this strategy – since running a contingent workforce program is expensive and approaching suppliers for volume rebates doesn’t always translate into an effective cost-cutting strategy. Innovative solutions like Direct Sourcing help to fill in these gaps. By using a combination of the latest technology, streamlined processes, and experienced professionals to manage the program, Direct Sourcing helps businesses reduce costs associated with their external vendors.
Direct Sourcing also helps leverage your brand to attract and engage talent from both your internal and external talent sources, thus ensuring a positive candidate experience. By building proactive talent pipelines for high-volume roles, Direct Sourcing also tremendously improves your speed-to-hire.
All-in-all Direct Sourcing is a tech-enabled services play that helps businesses develop a best-in-class Contingent Workforce or Total Talent Management program that is agile, diverse and high performing.
How Can Prosperix Help Your Direct Sourcing Efforts?
Prosperix is the first end-to-end workforce solution that addresses the entire hiring lifecycle, inclusive of talent attraction, branding, engagement, sourcing, assessments, recruiting, vendor management, onboarding, and workforce management. We help businesses propel their Direct Sourcing efforts by combining high-tech innovation with high-touch candidate experience.
Prosperix helps businesses tap into multiple haystacks of talent, empowering them with an exponential ability to hire. Prosperix also provides complete transparency into the hiring process, available talent pools, and performance, leading to outstanding hiring outcomes.
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