Direct Sourcing

The contingent workforce continues to grow, currently making up about 40% of the total workforce. HR professionals expect that number to grow even more over the next three years. For organizations, COVID-19 has significantly accelerated this timeline. To help source this workforce, many leading healthcare organizations are turning to direct sourcing.

Although there can be several nuances to how a direct-sourcing solution is designed and deployed, organizations (normally with the help of a partner like RightSourcing) typically begin by creating their own “private” talent network or pool – also known as a private talent cloud or private talent community. As more candidates are fed into the company’s private talent pool, it becomes a repository for matching candidates within the pool to new manager requests for contractor positions.

Benefits of Direct Sourcing

• On average, a 14% cost savings per placement over utilization of a traditional staffing agency, powering significant cost savings
• Fill time improvement of 1.2 days
• 4% average increase  in manager satisfaction with worker quality
• Improved ability to monitor and drive diversity initiatives
• Mitigated employee turnover risk

The first step in starting with direct sourcing is to build a talent base (or create the most targeted labor category of need) – while maintaining the highest levels of quality. In some cases, this process begins by creating a link on the organizations’ career site where candidates can apply directly for future contingent job opportunities. 

In other cases, managers may invite candidates to the talent community via a web link or mobile device. Many companies have opted to build their talent cloud with candidates from their Applicant Tracking System, individuals they have interviewed and consider “silver medalists,” and alumni and retirees with unique skillsets. Another strategy is to post contingent positions to job boards or professional network sites – LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, etc. All these options involve organizing the company’s “incoming” pipelines of talent to feed the talent cloud.

Most solutions consist of a combination of technology and curation services. Technology plays a critical part in matching candidates to positions quickly and accurately, with the best software leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to increase hiring success, ensure managers pay the right amount for resources, and achieve organizational diversity objectives.

The technology is also key to the candidate experience, ideally providing a simple, streamlined and modern interface for joining an organization’s talent network and responding to job opportunities.

Our DirectSource RS platform is the most sophisticated one-stop platform to effectively manage all aspects of direct sourcing for contingent labor.

Curation is the “people and services” part of the equation. Curation specialists are those individuals responsible for “curating” the talent pool and often have recruitment and sourcing backgrounds. Additionally, curators are responsible for communications strategies with the candidates – the communication is tailored specifically to categories based on where the candidate is in the hiring process. The curators also ensure talent pool hygiene by confirming candidate availability and requesting candidates refresh skills, experiences and contact information.

Direct-sourcing solutions should support, or at a minimum complement, other contingent workforce management solutions such as Managed Services Programs (MSP) and Vendor Management Systems (VMS). Other important components of a direct-sourcing solution require a payrolling/employer-of-record partner, independent contractor vetting and compliance expertise, and program management and analytics.