SkillSurvey To MSPs: Let Us Help You Recruit Talent

‘Digital recruitment and marketing tools can help you reach contacts faster right from SkillSurvey. And you can create campaigns to nurture and keep your contacts engaged,’ says Dan Taylor, alliances manager at talent intelligence company SkillSurvey.

With the continuation of talent shortages and employers needing to find creative ways to source qualified talent, SkillSurvey offers a way to fine-tune the process and help MSPs grow their team.

Dan Taylor, alliances manager at Malvern, Pa.-based talent intelligence company SkillSurvey, spoke to MSPs at CRN parent company The Channel Company’s XChange 2022 event in Denver this week about ways to find untapped talent.

“Recruiters and hiring managers are struggling more than ever to find new qualified skilled candidates,” Taylor said. “Adding to an already tight labor market, quitting rates are at all-time records.”

And to make matters worse, he said organizations are competing with each other for a small pool of talent.

“Recruiters and hiring managers are frequently being ghosted by candidates during the in-hiring process,” he said. “As the demand for high-quality talent rises, the need to build a sustainable talent pipeline gets even more urgent.”

The tight job market means candidates have choices and multiple job offers. He said one in four companies cite a lack of applicants as the top reason they can‘t fill open positions.

[Related: HERE’S HOW A DIGITAL PRESENCE GROWS YOUR BUSINESS]

To help with this, many sourcing professionals are turning to other methods, including social media, to help find candidates and optimize talent acquisition strategies.

Taylor said that online professional networks such as LinkedIn are the fastest-growing source for finding candidates, trailing behind online job boards.

“With more than 20,000 recruiter accounts today on LinkedIn, the top performers you‘re trying to reach are being tapped into multiple times, every month, from people getting emails on LinkedIn,” he said. “These results aren’t good for sourcing professionals, who are finding it harder to make that initial contact with the high-quality talent.”

Creative recruiters know that they need to make use of every tool to identify and engage top performers, he said, but they also need to make wise choices about where to invest time and resources.

To take creativity a step further, sourcing professionals are turning to specialized networks like GitHub or Reddit to find talent.

“This is in large part because these sites don‘t just list off potential candidates’ accomplishments, but they uncover candidates’ expertise and mastery in a particular industry or job specialty, and this is as mentioned by other experts in those fields,” he said.

As more recruiters adopt new technologies, they‘re discovering they can access better data faster.

With SkillSurvey, employers can leverage reference information and build their pipeline by targeting all candidates or asking new hires to refer others they think will be a great fit for the organization, he said.

Some organizations are even shifting their interview process and checking references earlier so they can see if the candidate’s past performance is a good indicator of future performance.

Through SkillSurvey, recruiters and sourcing professionals can easily create specific talent pipelines based on the job role and other key criteria and set alerts for the right contacts into the talent database.

“Digital recruitment and marketing tools can help you reach contacts faster right from SkillSurvey,” Taylor said. “And you can create campaigns to nurture and keep your contacts engaged.”

SkillSurvey also automates the reference-checking process by sending out an email survey to that candidate’s reference.

“You don‘t have to pick up the phone and call anymore,” Taylor said.

John Douglas, president and owner of Wichita, Kan.-based MSP Pileus Technologies, said his company is having recruitment issues and difficulty finding qualified candidates.

“Right now we‘ll post an ad and we’ll manually check it, but if we can have something that will actually go out check references for us, have people do that, that‘ll save us time and help us move forward.”