Introduction:
One needs to have dreams, plans, and strategies to be successful in any venture. This is a basic requirement. If you do not know, what you want, where you want to go and how you want to achieve the target (your mode and plan of success) – it’s certain that you cannot achieve your target.

In case you are starting a new venture or if you are planning to diversify your existing business, you also need to identify the source for your capital (Financial backing). You cannot do all these things on your own. You need “extra-ordinarily talented” and highly skilled people to help you to reach the goal that you have set for your organization. For this, you need a jeweler (the talented, matured and exceptionally skilled HR Professional) to identify such DIAMONDS for you. It is one of the key roles of a HR Professional to identify, source, select, hire and retain the BEST of the talent from the market to work for the organization. If they cannot find talented people from the market then they need to groom the right type of people with the right type of attitude and aptitude. We are in the era of “talent hunt”. It is becoming difficult to get right type of people and retain them. Many companies are losing their businesses because they are not able to hire “right type of people”; because they compromised with the “quality of the talent”. In this article, we will try to explore and understand different sources to get “Best of the Talents”. Any reference of HR Department” in this article, means Team of Talent Acquisition, Hiring and Recruitment.

Different Sources to Get Talented People
As a HR Professional (Chief Talent Acquisition Officer; Hiring Manager or Recruitment Head), one should be aware of all the sources and resources to get best of the talents and they should also be aware of as how to use those resources to the optimum level. You can use either or all of the below mentioned tools to get BEST talents.

1. Existing and “Active” Candidates Data with Company
 This is primary, if properly used, most important source and tool in the hands of the HR Department to get right type of people. The HR department gets N number of profiles every day from different sources (including candidates who just drop-in their profiles at the reception. The HR Department needs to maintain and update this data on a regular basis (if possible on daily basis). The details and data should be maintained in such a manner that one should be able to generate a MIS, stating number of profiles in the database, skills of the candidates (including education and experience level) and status of each profile (if short-listed or not; if interviewed or not; date of interview; result of the interview; if rejected or selected etc). All these profiles should be considered as “active profiles” for six months from the date they were received in the HR Department of the Company. Any other profile older than six months should be deleted and destroyed. Such profiles are of no use to the company. The HR department should be able to use this data to fill the existing vacant position with a MOST suitable profile.

2. Employee References
 In last decade and a-half, all the companies across various industries are facing a big challenge to retain the talent in their companies. People are resigning for various reasons. There is another challenge of fake profiles (People are faking about their experiences, salaries etc. Many people are just copying someone’s profile and presenting it as their own, without even knowing what they have mentioned in it). To handle this, it has become apparent to do reference checks. Getting the reference check done in a proper way is very costly.

 Considering the above two scenarios and just to counter it, it is important to hire a person through the reference of your existing employee. No one can present, market and brand your company, market the culture and policies of your company then a happy and highly motivated and engaged employee of your organization. Hence, hiring with the reference of your existing employees is an important source and tool to hire and retain Quality Talent.

3. Internal Advertisement (internal Job Posting)
 Learning is a continuous process. Many people keep on learning new skills, updating their skills and acquiring higher degrees through distance education etc. There by you might have “multi-skilled” and “multi-talented” people within your organization. Hence, it is crucial and important to post your job-requirement, internally for your existing employees. By doing so, you will be able to RETAIN good and talented people.

4. Jobsites and Job Portals
 If the above three sources and methods are used appropriately, efficiently and to the optimum level, hypothetically you do not need to go outside the company to get good people, working for your company. However, that is actually not possible and hence, you also need to look for external sources to get more suitable talent for your company. There are many job sites and job portals, available in the market and you need to select the best one for your needs. Good job portals have huge database of millions and millions of profiles. You can source a “suitable” talent from that database. You can also post your job requirements on job-portals just to get more relevant profiles. You should learn how to use all the features of your job-portal for its optimum utilization.
    You can also have the HR or job site of your company and post your requirements on that site. This will also give appropriate branding and advertisement to your company and will also help you in managing the “Candidate Database”.

5. Campus Hiring
 In case, you like to hire “knowledgeable, talented and properly groomed” freshers then you should opt for Campus Hiring. This will give you raw clay and material that you can mould as per the need and culture of your organization. You need to plan your “Campus Hiring” in a suitable manner to target right type of people. You need to decide, if you like to hire a plain graduate or a graduate with some specific training or Management Graduates or Engineering Graduates etc. If you provide right type of atmosphere, culture and processes, chances are that you will be able to retain these freshers, trainees for a long period of time. There are many  magazines, newspapers, web portals which publishes lists of the best institutes in different categories, locally, nationally and internationally.

6. Recruitment Consultancies
 Most of the time, even recruitment consultancies also uses various job-portals to source talent for their clients. Hence, it makes more sense, if you buy one login on any of the relevant job-portal (or more than one job portal) and if you learn how to use it properly. You need the help of Recruitment Consultants if you are planning to hire a talent through head-hunting for senior profiles and from different geographical locations; for example, if you are planning to hire someone from international market. Hence, taking the help of Recruitment Consultants to hire talent for you should not be your first choice or option.

7. External (Newspaper) Advertisements
 This one, a very costly source to hire talent. External Job-Advertisement on media (Newspaper, Television, Radio etc), helps you in Branding and Publicizing your company but if you are not able to target and manage properly, this can be poor, even very expensive source to get the suitable talent. You need to understand and plan properly, what type of people you are looking for, from where you can get those people, which newspaper do they read, how you want to get and manage these profiles and what you will be doing with that database or else, you will not be able to get suitable talent.

8. Social and Professional Networks & Local Communities
 There are few professional and social networks, such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, Orkut etc, that you can use these networks to get the right type of talent (of the listed networks, LinkedIn is highly recommended). You can also target few NGO’s, training institutes and local communities to hire low-level, low-cost workers for factories and your companies.

9. Head Hunting (Also called as “Body Shopping”)
 There is this bread or group of talent, which are highly experienced, competent with great leadership skills but very passive in job market. They are very experienced in their domain and industry. Sometimes, they are also the founder member of the organization. Generally these are the people working in the capacity of Senior Managers, General Managers, CFO’s, CTO’s, CEO’s, Vice-Presidents, Directors, and Managing Directors etc in their present roles. They do not post their profiles on jobsites. They do not even read job-sections of newspapers. They do not apply for any jobs opportunity. Only very few of their friends and close associates are in procession of their profiles. They need to be challenged by an opportunity. Such people need to be head-hunted. Generally, recruitment consultancies are expected to do this job. This is a way to get the talent when you are looking for rare and distinct talent that is when you are looking to fill positions like CFO, CEO etc. Here, numbers are not important but quality is. In a year, you might be able to head-hunt 15-20 people but they will be of high value. Not everyone can be a “Head Hunter”, you need to have “special” type of skills to be a “Head Hunter”. Every type of sourcing is not called as head-hunting. For a sourcing to be called as “Head-hunting”, this should involve “rare profiles”; profiles and skill sets not readily available in the market.

10. Talent-Poaching
 This, according to some section in the industry, is considered as unethical mode of sourcing and hiring. For this, you need to understand the business of your company and also should be aware of the competitor companies in your industry. Just target those companies and hire in masses from those companies right from the entry level to senior level. This tactic is usually used to kill the competition. This is like a big fish eating the small fish. People across the globe are discussing and debating to ascertain, if the “Talent Poaching” is ethical or unethical. No doubt, this is one of the easiest ways to source trained and talented people within the industry when you have infrastructure and money.

Distinction between Headhunting and Talent Poaching

Some talent acquisition managers as well as hiring and recruitment professionals are confused and are not able to discriminate between the two. Here are the few differences between the two:

1. Headhunting is associated with senior and rare profiles. Talent Poaching is just sweeping and running through talent-wealth of your competitor.

2. Headhunting is planned. Talent Poaching is targeted.

3. In headhunting, the intention is to get the BEST person for your organization but in Talent Poaching, the intention is to kill your competitor and the competition.

4. Headhunting is about getting a person with “Leadership” skills with “Global Exposure”. Talent Poaching is about “saving the training cost”.

Conclusion
This article is not about “Recruitment Process” or to describe about “Steps involved in Recruitment Process” but just to share the resources and channels to source and identify talent. I have taken care to list all the possible channels. I am sure all the readers will gain from this article.