Candidate Engagement Workshop

virtual or in-person training for teams

Sourcing training for recruiters

This workshop is focused exclusively on candidate engagement, not on Boolean search or the finding part of sourcing.

LinkedIn, online communities, and sourcing tools like Seekout have made the finding part of sourcing so much easier than before.  The hard(er) part now is getting leads and potential candidates to engage with you.

This workshop is all about aligning with your hiring managers on target candidate profiles, understanding your target candidate profile motivators, building a tailored pitch, contacting candidates, converting leads into candidates, engaging hiring managers to be part of the attraction efforts, and presenting candidates to hiring managers. All with a focus on speed, quality, diversity, and candidate experience.

If you need hands-on, laptop-open, Boolean search training, sorry – we don’t offer that anymore.

This workshop is designed to improve your response rates to hard-to-engage candidates via LinkedIn, email, texts/SMS, social media, and good old-fashioned phone calls.

This is a very practical, how-to workshop – not death-by-PowerPoint best-practices training.  Your recruiters will break down real reqs to build out the right messaging to engage passive candidates during the workshop.  We’ll craft real outreach communication and contact candidates during the workshop. We’ll give you templates that help you build the right “what’s in it for me?” messaging needed to get top talent – and move away from the “help wanted” or job-description outreach that’s seen as spam by all top candidates.

“5/5!  I learned so much. How to personalize my outreach and how to organize my time to source more productively.”

Recruiter, ESPN

Download Candidate Engagement Lab Overview
Typical agendas include a focus on:

  • How to build your sourcing strategy and target candidate profile
  • How to calibrate candidates, push back on unrealistic profiles, and build credibility with Hiring Managers
  • How to research and identify target companies and candidate communities
  • How to identify the highest ROI sources and approaches for your search
  • How to efficiently search the web for thousands of hidden bios, resumes, and profiles
  • How to find and engage candidates from underrepresented groups to improve diversity
  • How to source beyond LinkedIn
  • How to find contact information for passive talent
  • How to engage top talent through email, InMail, social media, and phone, including template emails and phone scripts and the keys to overcoming objections
  • How to use tools and technology to maximize your limited time

We custom-build the training content to align to your goals, your culture, and development opportunities.  We can deliver the training in-person in your offices over ¾ to 1 full day, or virtually, via a tool like Zoom, over multiple days, broken into 2.5-hour modules.

The training workshop includes presentation, scenario-based practice, laptop-open work, small group discussions, all credibly delivered by one of our Senior Consultants, who each have 12+ years of experience in corporate recruiting.  We kick off the engagement to build your training with focus groups to learn more about your current state, challenges, existing internal best practices, and biggest development needs.  The focus groups include calls with hiring managers, recruiters/sourcers, and recruiting leaders.  This gives us insights we can use to tailor the scenarios so that your recruiters work on immediately-actionable challenges, and walk away feeling more skilled, more confident as they elevate their sourcing and candidate engagement capabilities.

During the training, recruiters and sourcers work on solving their real-world sourcing challenges.  How?  They bring their laptops and their most challenging reqs/searches to work on real-time during your workshop. After the training, they head back to their desks with easy-to-use tools and guides to help them better find, engage, and recruit the right talent for your organization.  This helps the training stick, so that your recruiters use what they learn.

  • Sourcing Strategy Kickoff Guide
  • Candidate Tradeoff Triangle
  • Candidate Presentation Email
  • Sourcing Research Spreadsheet
  • Boolean Search Strings Spreadsheet
  • Candidate Outreach Template Emails
  • Cold Call Talking Points
  • Overcoming Objections Guide
  • Sourcing Resource Website Recommendations
  • Sourcer Productivity Tool Recommendations
This custom training is designed for teams of 12+ junior to senior corporate recruiters, new and experienced sourcers, and HR generalists who need to source more. We conduct focus group calls with your recruiters (and/or sourcers) before we design your training. This helps us to customize the content – especially the real-world exercises your recruiters will work through – to the skill level of the recruiters who will participate.  We get feedback from new recruiters to very experienced recruiters that the training was practical, highly relevant, and credibly delivered.

This training is built for corporate recruiting teams only.  If you work for an agency or RPO firm and you like our approach, or if you’re looking for individual training, you can check out our resources for solo recruiters, agencies, and small teams here.

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“It’s been almost a year and a half, and my recruiters still talk about the training you did for us. It was the best training we’ve had, and very practical. They actually use the techniques and tools they learned.”

– Senior Manager, Recruiting, T-Mobile

Who hires us?

Google. The Gap. Booking. Disney. T-Mobile. Activision. Leading companies around the world choose Recruiting Toolbox as a partner when they’re looking to up-level the sourcing capabilities of their recruiting teams.

Why choose our custom sourcing training workshop for your hiring teams?

All of our training is custom-built to align with your recruiting team’s challenges, goals, skill gaps, culture, and process. The actual workshop agenda is developed in partnership with you, the recruiting leader. We leverage real-world sourcing scenarios to ensure that recruiters leave with practical, actionable sourcing strategies and tactics. We build these scenarios after conducting focus group calls with your team, so that we’re sure they’re on target.

Our workshops are credibly delivered by former corporate Recruiting and Sourcing Leaders, not generic trainers. We have practitioner experience, and understand how to engage junior to senior recruiting teams, including skeptics who are reluctant to change or maybe even think they have little to learn. We know nobody wants some academic, preachy trainer telling them “you’re doing it wrong” – that’s not us. We get the challenges of recruiting, and it shows up in post-training feedback.  (Our four trainers who teach our sourcing training have all been highly rated presenters at SourceCon, and geek out on sourcing.)

We understand the type of corporate recruiting environment your recruiters work in. We ensure that the strategies and tactics we share are realistic given your req loads, priorities, recruiting culture, and budget. We teach recruiters how to prioritize and use the right tool for the job and reduce the hype surrounding many of the shiny-object tools so that recruiters learn the real-world best practices that actually generate hires and create future pipelines of talent.

We’re here to work and practice what we’re learning. Our workshops are not presentations, where learners sit back and passively listen while checking their email or Slack. Instead, we engage the team throughout the workshop by leveraging real-time Q&A, scenario-based exercises, laptop-open practice, speed round best practice sharing, live demonstrations, and interactive discussions. We also bring a real-world humility that comes out in the – often comical – stories we share to reinforce the learning objectives.

Recruiters leave the training excited to source, with new capabilities and confidence to tackle their most difficult searches.

Your recruiting team will receive practical tools and guides designed to help them source and engage talent, educate hiring managers, push back on unrealistic target candidate profiles, and present quality candidates to hiring managers.

After the training has been delivered, we work closely with your recruiting leadership team to recommend changes to ensure the best practices stick.  How do we get recruiters to use these new guides and tools, how do we drive adoption of these new sourcing practices, how do we hold them accountable for these new expectations?  We can help.

Use our Sourcing Excellence Diagnostic Tool to self-evaluate how your company’s teams are selecting and hiring talent.

Download the Sourcing Excellence Diagnostic Tool

“5/5!  I learned so much.  Sourcing outside of LinkedIn, how to personalize my outreach, how to organize my time to source more, and chrome extensions that will make me more productive.”

– Recruiter, ESPN

“Terrific Program.  Learned better ways to reach out to passive candidates.  Learned far more than I thought I would.”

– Senior Recruiter, TripAdvisor

“Awesome materials and tools that I will definitely utilize going forward.”
– Senior Recruiter, Activision

“It’s been almost a year and a half, and my recruiters still talk about the training you did for us. It was the best training we’ve had, and very practical. They actually use the techniques and tools they learned.”

– Senior Manager, Recruiting, T-Mobile

“5/5! Really well thought out program that targeted the correct areas that I could definitely use improvement on.”

– UK Sourcer, BNY Mellon

“Fantastic!  Very engaging and interactive.  Enjoyed the chance to practice.”

– Senior Recruiter, Union Bank

“Great workshop.  You could tell he really researched our reqs and company beforehand.  And what we learned was actionable, not theory.”

– Senior Recruiter, Expedia

“The program was very practical and interesting; sourcing techniques, tips to get better information from hiring manager; tips to write better emails.”

– HR Manager, The Gap

“Often these types of trainings can be too general or too basic.  The exercises you built for us were really tailored to our real-life situations, so they really hit the mark.  We will use what we learned.  Great program.”

– Recruiting Manager, Alberta Health Services

Next Steps

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Sourcing Lab Training Overview

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Download the
Sourcing Excellence Diagnostic Tool

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Contact Us About
Custom Sourcing Training

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Frequently Asked Questions

A typical workshop will have up to 20 corporate recruiters in each workshop, so that we can keep everyone engaged, and keep the exercises and small group work small enough so that everyone feels like they’re contributing in your in-person or virtual training. If you have a team larger than 20 people, we’d deliver multiple sessions.

We really want and need a team of at least 12 recruiters to make this workshop engaging and – frankly – for you to be able to justify the investment you’d make in time and money to work with us to build the custom workshop for you.

Yes, we work with big global companies like Booking, Google, EA Games, SAP, Adidas, Disney, and Atlassian. Sometimes clients will fly their recruiters into their regional hubs, and our consultants will travel there to deliver the training in-person over 2 days.  For example, this is what Booking did – they flew 75 recruiters into their HQ in Amsterdam, and we sent 3 of our trainers there to deliver their training in person.  Sometimes we’ll build out the training for virtual delivery, leveraging a tool like Zoom with virtual breakout rooms, and deliver sessions as modules of 2.5 hours each over many days and time zones.

Sorry, it’s not.  This training is built for corporate recruiting teams only.  If you like our approach, you can check out some of our free resources here.

It depends on the scope, but fees start at about $25,000.

Our workshop facilitators are former corporate recruiting and sourcing leaders who have built and scaled sourcing capabilities in corporate environments. We’ve all started out as hands on recruiters, and have applied the techniques and best practices shared in this workshop to earn the right to be a strategic sourcing partner to the hiring managers and execs we’ve supported. Your recruiters will know – right away – that our team has walked the talk. We’ll bring the confidence – and humility (no big egos here!) – that comes from years of working on unrealistic reqs, in difficult hiring markets. Our trainers who teach our sourcing training have all been highly rated presenters at SourceCon, and geek out on candidate engagement.

Sorry, we’re not set up to offer 1:1 training.  We build custom training for teams of 12+ people.  However, you’re welcome to check out some of our free resources – including training-quality recorded webinars, best practice articles, and expert pages.

Sourcing Training Workbook for Recruiters

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