We live in the era when it takes less than five minutes to find out where a certain person lives and how much he/she is paying the rent. So, sourcing candidates shouldn't be a problem for any recruiter.

With constant technological progress, connecting with candidates through the noise of all the other 2,000 recruiters trying to reach out to the same candidates has become the greatest obstacle for recruiters.

For worse, the noise will only increase as more sourcing tools are becoming available. Since use of the great new tools is unavoidable, each recruiter should consider following these 5 ways to cut through the noise:

1. Build a strong employer brand

If you think that you can cut the noise simply by calling every potential candidate or spam them with emails, you’re seriously wrong. Instead, you should build out your employer brand. Because if you have a great employer brand, you can demand top candidates and avoid the need to  always chase them.

Now you’re probably wondering how to build out that employer brand? You can find tons of resources online about that exact subject, including this post. There are few important things you should remember while building out your employer brand:

• Candidates always look for a company with the brand they’d be proud to be associated with

• All starts with the images and messages the company projects in its job posts

• Always make sure the candidates are contacted and treated well by your company

• Emphasize that people can advance within your organization

• Put your brand message not only in words but in actions and accessories

2. Build a great employee referral program

As it’s already said at the beginning of this post, we live in a time when we easily can find a large number of people who use the internet to find the job or the recruiters find them with job offers. Candidates use powerful tools like LinkedIn and apply for multiple positions. They also get notifications about jobs that match their search criteria on a daily basis. Because all of that, it’s essential for recruiters to cut that noise and find other methods of searching for talents.

Nothing cuts through the noise faster than asking your employees to tell their friends about a new position in your company.

Firms that have employee referral programs have 25% higher retention rates of employees after two years in comparison to other companies. It’s the "win-win" situation for both, potential candidates and company since your current employees will refer the people they know from the previous job or they are fellow students. Employee referral programs give you the opportunity for making a smooth transition because you already have intermediaries who know your company’s culture and can estimate which friend fits in it. That can be very good way to hire people who will stay in your company and put an effort to move up in the company's hierarchy.

3. Write to your audience and do it well

First of all, research well the job description in order to know to whom you need to write on some social media platform. Next thing you have to do is to figure out how would you speak to them if you get the chance to chat with them?  

The great talents are getting 20+ email or messages weekly. So, you need to write about something they would want to keep reading. How? Try to be informative, casual or even funny… just please don’t be a douche and ask candidates "why did you respond to my message?" or something like that.

4. Always think about retention

Despite such big progress of technology and tools for recruiters, they are often ignoring one key metric: retention. Every company judge recruiters on the quality of their hires and their fit and often don't think about the time candidate will be staying in the firm. Retention is the best way to measure the quality of recruiter’s work.

Jim Stroud said: "Shouldn’t how long a person stays with a company be the ultimate test of a recruiter? To put it another way, isn’t it better to judge a matchmaker by the number of divorces that have resulted from their handiwork vs the marriages they have influenced?"

Tactics of "always be closing" almost never works when we are talking about recruiting. You should never have a working philosophy as the aggressive salesman who is "always closing the deal" and will stop at nothing to win.

When you’re job is to "sell" jobs, this model is out of place. Remember, recruiting isn’t just about filling a position, it’s about building the right relationships so you can fill the position with the right person.

5. Focus on passive candidates

Be organized and efficient. Build lists of top talent you can track down without needing to re-search the same candidates all over again. So, if you already have done the search, you should have a list.

Collect emails in a separate database and use LinkedIn to see a person's updated profile.

Every company can manage to recruit the cream of the cream, and boast a continuum of top candidates in every department. Procurement talent is no exception, but it can be hard when you are based in San Francisco, where the demand for Supply Managers and Category Manager is much greater than quantity of them on the job market.

Everyone is really struggling for procurement people and you definitely need to look for passive candidates for those positions. So, in cases like that, recruiting passive candidates is an essential, since there are simply not enough qualified active talents to choose from.

By focusing on passive candidates, you can save a significant amount of time for you and your company. When you’re hiring active candidates, you have to spend a disproportionate period of time weeding out few candidates who are qualified, yet don’t have desired salary range, and are willing to relocate. Dealing with passive candidates saves your time because they are already preselected by you or other fellow recruiters, which can help with bypassing that drudgery.

Passive candidates are, generally, better employees in comparison to active candidates. According to The Undercover Recruiter, there are 120% more chances that passive candidates will want to change current jobs and 33% more chances to want more challenging work.  Also, they aren’t as needy as the active ones, and there are 17% fewer chances to require skill development.

How To Recruit Passive Candidates

About 92% of companies use social media (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) to recruit talents, and for really good reason. A quick post or tweet can easily reach a large number of people very fast. Communicating through social networks also can be less formal than other communication channels, such as ads or email. This informality is principally important when we are talking about recruiting passive candidates. Communicating that way is more helpful in relationship building.

If you want to attract passive candidates, you should be a little bit crafty and follow comments on the tweets of companies you cooperate with, and you may find some interested people and chat with them. Participants in these discussions can learn more about the inner workings of your company, for instance, or find out how one day in the life of someone in a certain position looks like.

Of course, these people are not only labeled as job seekers, but they provide a fun opportunity to engage with them and create meaningful relationships.

LinkedIn is the most useful platform in passive candidate recruiting. There you can find over 75% of fully employed members that are not actively looking for work, so the network is lavish with passive candidates.