Sourced candidates are twice as efficient to hire as applicants. Yet, the process of finding the right talent for your organization can still be extremely time-consuming and pull your attention away from strategic priorities.
TL;DR
- A candidate sourcing VA finds and ranks passive candidates.
- Sourcing, coordination, and hiring decisions are distinct, VA-supported tasks.
- VAs track unhired candidates to help rebuild your pipeline later.
- Integrate VAs into your existing applicant databases.
As a recruiter or hiring manager, your time investment in recruiting is best spent in two ways:
- Having conversations with qualified candidates to evaluate who is the best fit and who you should keep in mind for future opportunities.
- Maintaining relationships with top talent, so you have a strong pipeline for future roles.
Working with a virtual assistant can help you spend most of your time on those activities, instead of focusing on all of the research, coordination, and data entry required to secure top talent.
Here's how.
Candidate Sourcing vs. Recruiting Support
Candidate sourcing, talent acquisition, and recruitment coordination often get lumped together as one big bucket of "recruiting help," but they're distinct tasks that call for different skills. A candidate sourcing VA focuses specifically on finding and qualifying passive candidates, not making the final hiring call or managing every step of the process. Knowing where sourcing ends and other recruiting tasks begin helps you delegate the right work to the right support, and keeps your in-house team focused on the parts of recruiting that genuinely need their judgment.
| Task | Who owns it |
|---|---|
| Finding and qualifying passive candidates | Candidate sourcing VA |
| Scheduling interviews and managing logistics | Recruitment coordination VA |
| Evaluating candidates and making the final call | You |
Splitting these out this way means your VA can move fast on the repetitive work, while you stay focused on the conversations and decisions that actually need your judgment.
How Candidate Sourcing VAs Find Talent Faster
Often, the most time-consuming step of recruiting is sourcing passive candidates. This issue is especially prominent when you're filling a role that has very broad or very specific requirements. In the former, you have an over-abundance of options, while in the later, you may struggle to find enough qualified people to reach out to.
The more time you spend sourcing, the less time you have to evaluate if candidates you find are a good fit. A candidate sourcing VA can help by tackling the sourcing process for you. All you have to do is give them your requirements, and they'll find you a list of qualified candidates.
Candidate sourcing VAs are trained to identify passive talent via LinkedIn Recruiter, execute advanced boolean search strings, and platforms like GitHub and AngelList. They extract verified contact details and log prospects directly into your applicant tracking system (ATS), like Greenhouse or Lever.
If you have a large candidate pool, they can also help you save time by prioritizing recruits. For example, let's say your job specification has ten qualifications. Two are non-negotiable, four are highly desirable, and you'd like candidates to have at least one of the remaining four.A virtual assistant can take this information and rank candidates based on how closely they fit your criteria. This allows you to speak to potential recruits to determine how qualified they appear to be, which can help narrow down candidates faster, especially when you don't have much time to fill a role.
Spend More Time in Conversations Instead of Coordinating Them
The average time-to-fill in the U.S. now sits at roughly 39 days. A lot of that time gets eaten up by back-and-forth scheduling rather than actual candidate evaluation. Spending that much time coordinating logistics instead of running interviews is a huge waste of time.
To choose the best talent, you need to focus on evaluating candidates and giving them opportunities to see their potential growth at your organization. An easy way to do that is to offload coordination to a virtual assistant. They'll schedule interviews, resolve last-minute conflicts, and send out information that everyone involved needs in advance, such as the candidate's resume, interview questions, and instructions for the candidate.
You can use the time you save to engage in more thoughtful deliberations about who your organization should move forward with.
How a Candidate Sourcing VAs Maintain Long-Term Candidate Relationships
Less than half of recruiters and hiring managers stay in-touch with strong candidates who aren't hired for the initial position they applied for. This is a significant lost opportunity since many of them may be a good fit for future roles.
Maintaining relationships with these runner-up candidates expedites future hiring. Because they are already pre-screened, you can quickly reach out to a trusted network of candidates when new roles open up.
A virtual assistant can manage this process for you by using your applicant tracking system (ATS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, or equivalent tool to:
- Document why candidates weren't hired - this lets you filter who you should and shouldn't reach out to
- Save LinkedIn profiles since that's often the most stable piece of contact information
- Tag candidates for the types of future roles they would be a good fit for and store notes on their qualifications
Depending on your style of recruiting, they can help you use this information in two ways:
- If you enjoy maintaining relationships with candidates, they can set reminders for you to reach out based on a time cadence or specific triggers such as when you're attending industry events that they may also be at.
- Run reports of former candidates and check their LinkedIn profiles to identify people who are a good fit for roles you're currently hiring for.
Both of these approaches let you easily source from your existing network and maintain valuable professional connections.
Is a Candidate Sourcing VA Right for your Team?
Not every hiring team needs a candidate sourcing VA right away. It helps to know the signals (and the cost) before you commit.
A candidate sourcing VA tends to be the right fit if:
- You're filling multiple roles at once and don't have time to source for all of them.
- You keep losing good candidates to competitors because your outreach is too slow.
- Your in-house recruiters are spending more time searching for candidates than talking to them.
Ready to Add a Candidate Sourcing VA to your Team?
Offloading sourcing and coordination to a virtual assistant lets you secure the best talent for current and future roles. To learn more about how support would work for your specific situation, reach out to us for a free consultation.
FAQs about Candidate Sourcing VAs
What is a candidate sourcing VA and what do they do?
A candidate sourcing VA is a specialized virtual assistant that proactively identifies, qualifies, and organizes qualified talent for your open roles. They utilize tools like LinkedIn, Boolean search strategies, and various job boards to build targeted lists of active and passive candidates. By taking over these labor-intensive top-of-funnel activities, they allow recruiters to focus entirely on interviewing and hiring decisions.
How can a candidate sourcing VA improve the efficiency of our talent pipeline?
A candidate sourcing VA streamlines your recruitment process by managing the most time-consuming parts of recruiting. This constant pipeline maintenance prevents top talent from falling through the cracks and significantly reduces your overall time-to-hire.
How does a candidate sourcing virtual assistant help maintain candidate relationships?
Sourcing VAs keep your talent pool warm by organizing and tracking former, high-quality candidates who were not selected for prior roles but remain good fits for future opportunities.
They update profiles in your CRM or ATS, tag candidates based on their specific skill sets, and schedule reminders for you to reach out periodically. This proactive relationship management ensures you have a pre-screened pipeline ready to activate the moment a new position opens.
How is a candidate sourcing VA different from a recruiter?
A candidate sourcing VA focuses specifically on finding and qualifying passive candidates, not managing full-cycle recruiting or making hiring decisions. A recruitment coordination VA handles interview scheduling and logistics while you evaluate candidates and make the final call. When your candidate sourcing VA moves fast on repetitive search work, you’re able to stay focused on the conversations that really need your judgment.