You receive a new job requisition.  You post the job to numerous channels, sort through candidate resumes that come into your ATS, set up interviews and hopefully find a candidate that you hire.  Rinse and repeat.

With new job requisitions coming up every day and some that drag on without finding the right candidate, it can be easy to lose yourself in the day to day and focus less on the big picture.  It’s what I like to refer as “recruiting with blinders on”.

The reference comes from horse racing.  Blinders are a mechanism put on race horses to make it so they can’t look back and can only focus on what’s in front of them.  Some trainers believe this helps their horses focus on the race instead of the crowds and other horses.

When I talk about “recruiting with blinders on”, I’m referring to organizations that are just looking at meeting their immediate goals.  They are so focused on finding that next hire that they never take a step back to create a process that helps them find that next hire more easily in the future.

Here are a few examples of practices that I’ve seen of organizations “recruiting with blinders on”:

Sourcing but Not Capturing

Recruiting with blinders: The organization is sourcing candidates through LinkedIn and other sourcing channels but never take the candidates they source and capture them in their own database or Recruiting CRM.  Many of the contacts sourced for a particular campaign are lost once a candidate is found that fits the position.  Or they are collected but are only available to a segmented group or individual sourcer / recruiter.

Recruiting without blinders: An organization uses multiple sourcing tools and has all their sourcers add every contact to a central database.  For future job campaigns, these sourcers utilize this Talent Network as a sourcing channel to find previously sourced candidates that fit the position.

Not Evaluating Job Boards

Recruiting with blinders: An organization spends a good chunk of change on a job board or another recruiting channel because they have for years and they are usually able to fill job positions on time.  They currently have little to no idea where candidates are actually coming from to get to their ATS.

Recruiting without blinders: An organization distributes and tracks key recruiting metrics for every job distribution campaign.  They know how every job board & recruiting channel they use is performing in terms of bringing in recruiting contacts, applicants and most importantly in terms of hires.  They re-evaluate every recruiting channel they use on a bi-annual basis.

One-off job Campaigns

Recruiting with blinders: An organization starts a whole new recruitment marketing campaign for each job requisition that opens up.  They post to job boards and find new sourcing candidates that fit the position.

Recruiting without blinders: An organization gets a new job requisition and first taps its internal Talent Network for quality candidates & sends off emails to all that are qualified (and these candidates are responsive since they’ve engaged with them at least once per month).  The recruiters take a look in their ATS and contact candidates that were quality candidates but not the hires for similar positions.  Lastly, when it sends a job ad to a job board, it includes an opt-in form in the apply process to capture more recruiting contacts for future campaigns.

Every recruitment marketing campaign should have two goals in mind.  First, you will want to find a quality candidate to hire at your company.  Second and just as important, you want to find as many qualified candidates as possible for your Talent Network (opt-in, a centralized database and metrics can help you do that!) as that will help you fulfill your first goal more times than not!