How to Source Candidates with Salary and Skills Data

Start your candidate search with a few key insights and shortcuts.

As a recruiter, you’re always look for candidate sourcing strategies that help you recruit the best candidates quickly. You want to be targeted with your search, yet you may not always have the time or resources to spend on pulling data or perfecting your sourcing techniques. But, considering that companies lost an average of $14,900 on every bad hire in the last year, you can’t afford to slack on any part of the sourcing process.

So, how can you better focus your recruiting efforts and make the right hires? By starting your candidate search with a few key insights and shortcuts:

  • Average earnings data: In today’s candidate-centric market, you need to offer competitive compensation if you want to hire top talent. By having median earnings data for the specific occupation as well as other similar occupations, you’ll get a better sense of what your competitors are paying, how your compensation compares and whether you’ll need to increase your starting salaries.
  • Top skills: What are the hard and soft skills to look for in a candidate for your open jobs? Having a list of desired skills on-hand while sourcing candidates will help you more easily narrow down your pool of prospects.
  • Boolean search basics: If you want to quickly and effectively source candidates for your open positions, you need to know how to perform a Boolean search.