In an increasingly competitive job market, talent acquisition teams are constantly innovating and re-imagining ways to identify, engage and delight top talent while consolidating expenses. Following this trend, strategies such as direct sourcing and talent curation continue to gain traction. 

Both methods offer a new way to recruit quality candidates with the right skills, eliminate unnecessary expenses, and maximize the efficiency of the talent procurement processes. 

Direct Sourcing

During the continued push for skill diversity, efficient processes, and cost savings, direct sourcing offers a solution. 

Employers are always searching for new cost-effective approaches to talent acquisition to minimize their reliance on staffing agencies. Direct sourcing offers businesses the ability to source talent from candidate pipelines on their own.

What is Direct Sourcing?

Direct sourcing is the process of sourcing talent directly from the available labor market via a mixed channel approach, including job boards, company site job postings, referrals, internal hiring, retired employees, etc., and aggregating all candidates into one talent pool. Companies maintain both internal candidate networks and external sourcing pools to maximize their reach.

Internal candidate networks are pipelines of talent sourced from the internal company structure. These include referred candidates, past employees, internal hires, and more. External sourcing pools are groupings of diverse talent sourced from alumni networks, staffing solutions, recruiters, job posting platforms, and other networks. 

Once these candidate pipelines are established, they can be engineered to feed into a refined talent repository. This is where talent curation and managed direct sourcing enters the picture. 

Talent Curation & Managed Direct Sourcing 

Without a way to channel and refine a pool of potential candidates, businesses may be left with a sea of overqualified, underqualified, incompatible, or dispassionate candidates. Instead, talent curation is a direct sourcing method that can help introduce some selectivity into the system. 

What is Talent Curation?

In more defined terms, talent curation is the process of carefully managing a repository of directly sourced candidates. Talent identified by direct sourcing streams is sifted through screenings and resume reviews. Candidates who exhibit the ideal qualities a company is searching for are redirected into a selective pool of qualified prospective future employees.

When this process is managed by an in-house or third-party workforce management solution, it can also be referred to as “managed direct sourcing”. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are an excellent resource to manage and curate talent pools due to their expertise in the labor market.

Managed Direct Sourcing and MSPs

MSPs leverage expert knowledge and tried-and-true strategies to maximize the results of direct sourcing. They accomplish this by arranging direct candidate pipelines, enhancing curation processes, handling position requisitions and submissions, and managing the workforce. 

This method of sourcing operates in three steps:

1. Source Talent through internal & external sourcing methods
2. MSPs Curate a Talent Repository of screened and qualified candidates, separating them into groupings based on skills and position relevancy. This is often referred to as a talent cloud.
3. Select Eligible Candidates from the new candidate pipeline to enter the interviewing processes.

By partnering with an MSP for managed direct sourcing, businesses can hire quality employees at scale, reduce costs, and save time. 

Managed Sourcing Strategies with HCMWorks

As an MSP, HCMWorks can partner with your business to source top talent and support your contingent workforce management objectives. Our solution helps you streamline, consolidate and manage your contingent workforce supply chain from requisition to payment and every process in between. 

Get in touch with one of our contingent workforce experts today to discover how our MSP programs can elevate your business.