If you read my last SourceCon article, High Volume Recruiting When InMail Count Is Low – Oh No!, I talked about what to do when your paid messages are running low. One of the solutions that I didn’t mention was to try to get your messages increased.
Sometimes, this can be as simple as just asking your manager in your next 1:1. Asking in the middle of a quarter or halfway through the year might not be the best time, but definitely ask if you think this is something that can make an impact. If your manager doesn’t believe that it is a possibility, there are a few things you could try doing that might just help open up the doors.
If you are a Sourcer, there is a good chance that you like numbers. That’s a big part of our job. We love to pull pie charts and talk about what they represent, supply and demand reports, source of hire.
Being able to pull these numbers can help you increase your budget when it comes to things like Indeed messages and InMails. At the end of the quarter, run numbers for things such as sourced candidates, deliverables, offers, hires. If Indeed was able to give you six hires this past quarter, bring this up to your manager.
The more data you can put together and bring to your manager, the more they can bring to their manager, and so on.Reallocating Funds
Another big part of being a Sourcer is research. We are always looking up candidates in new places. We are learning about other ways to write specific tech stack. We are learning about what a specific role does so we can best create a job description and pull in the best and correct type of candidates. Another thing that we often do is try out new job boards and resume databases.
If you work in the healthcare industry, you might try out a job board such as www.jobsinhealthcare.com/. If you hire SaaS people, you might post your jobs on Tax Talent. If you are in the accounting space, you might post jobs on iHireAccounting. And after a month, you might see a fresh new batch of applicants and want to continue using this platform or, well, the exact opposite.
If you put $250 into a new job board last month and you know that it isn’t getting you anywhere, that $250 could go towards another possible batch of Indeed or LinkedIn messages.
Over the last decade or so, companies have understood the true power of hiring a Sourcer or team of Sourcers. Before we came along, Recruiters and the rest of the TA teams would throw a bunch of money towards agencies. Depending on the size of the company and the amount of roles that needed to be filled, these companies might have been spending millions of dollars every year in agency spend. So, try to use this data to talk about how an extra few hundred dollars, or thousand dollars, is still going to save you a lot of money in the long run.
Learning how the higher-up’s work is an important factor in having yourself heard and possibly getting a little extra money thrown your way for increased messages. It could be just your manager that you need to sell. It could be the VP of Talent Acquisition. It could be the CEO of your company if you work for a smaller company. Just find out how it is they like to see their data and present it in that way.
If they like to see a pie chart to really be sold, export your information into a pie chart. Or, if they want just straight numbers, do it that way. And if this is something you have to ask to find out – then do just that!
Lastly, if you are saying right now, “Mikey, how am I supposed to pull these reports?” Or “How does one export a pie chart?” Or “What is a pie chart?” I will say the same thing that I do when speaking at conferences, or in my other articles, or in my trainings: Look it up! This article was not meant to teach you step-by-step how to put numbers together or how to present to a decision-maker. Those are things that you can look up on your own.
We are researchers, so use your Boolean to find the most affordable, informational, and powerful pieces of training!
Everything is right at your fingertips. Run some numbers, sell yourself, and get those messages increased!
