Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

To celebrate our partnership with TalentDrive, we are dedicating this week on our blog to Resume Sourcing. You can learn more about our partnership and how it’s integrated into our Recruitment Marketing Platform by visiting the Resume Sourcing section of our website.

With every successful job ad distribution and Resume Sourcing campaign, there is one rule that must be followed all the time: “Know Thy Talent!”

“Know Thy Talent” is a concept that incorporates a few different ideas. First, you need to fully understand your company culture and the personalities that excel in that type of environment. Second, you need to understand the position you are recruiting for and what skills are needed to not only excel in the position but what skills compliment the other skill-sets already on the team. The best way to identify the personalities and skills needed is to identify top employees already at your company and determine what traits and skills have enabled them to excel in your working environment! Talk to supervising managers about their employees and get their opinions as well!

Most importantly, “knowing your talent” is a process needs to happen before you start any of your recruitment marketing campaigns. As it is absolutely crucial to understand, in order to effectively create exceptional job ads for job posting campaigns and identify the right keywords for resume sourcing searches. Without a clear understanding of the type of talent that works well at your company, your recruiting campaigns just can’t be as effective as you want them to be.

While Step 1 is identifying and documenting what the right personalities and skills need to be for future employees, Step 2 is the nitty gritty of actually figuring out how to attract these types of candidates. This means that you need to test the applicants you receive from your recruitment marketing campaigns versus your perfect candidate from Step 1. The key is to continuously monitor how changes to your recruitment messaging and resume search keywords have on the quality of applicants you are bringing in through job ad distribution and resume sourcing. Keep optimizing this strategy until you start to get the type of talent you are looking for.

Overall, job ad distribution and resume sourcing are great ways to attract top qualified talent. However, in order to have them be successful you need to first identify the type of talent that will excel at your company because once you know what employees are an ideal fit, you can go about finding them.

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly is the provider of the first recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that provides companies and staffing firms with the best real time recruitment metrics for all their recruiting efforts online.