Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at sourcing technology Visage. Visage is a platform that allows you to leverage crowdsourced, best-in-classes sourcers from around the world with AI embedded technology and outreach.

I run a technical staffing firm, where all of my recruiters run a full desk and I would classify them as excellent sourcers in their own right. But, like every other company, from time to time we have capacity issues. Too many jobs, not enough time and talent to get them filled!

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a professional sourcer at your beck and call?

I had a friend refer Visage to me. She and her team were using it to help them source passive candidates that her recruiting team could then reach out to. Of course, I was skeptical. Sure! I’m going to pay them money to have some person in India working for $2 a day just sending me crap off LinkedIn and Job Board databases! I didn’t need that, I needed “real” sourcing help! Thankfully, Visage actually worked.

How does Visage work?

• You give them an upload or a copy and paste of the job you want them to work, and their AI matching technology immediately matches you with a real Sourcing Pro that has background and knowledge of the type of talent you are looking for. The more details the better!
• This Sourcing Pro then goes to work and will send you around twenty potential candidates. Your Recruiter then takes a look at the first run of candidates and gives feedback to the Visage sourcer.
• The platform runs on credits. So you buy so many credits for so many dollars, the more you buy the cheaper they get, etc.
• On the back-end, the Visage sourcing pros are actually graded on how well they do based on your feedback on the candidates they send you. So, if a Sourcer sucks, they won’t last long, because they’ll grade out poorly and eventually be dumped.
• From the Visage platform, you can then send personalized emails out to candidates.

What we learned:

• The more detail you give the sourcing pro the better the quality of candidates they send you. Understand these are only “sourced” candidates, completely passive, there is no outreach by the sourcing pro to these candidates. So, you can get very specific: We don’t want candidates from “X” company, and only in “X” market or city, and must have three years of experience, and they must be from “A, B, or C” company.
• If a Sourcing Pro sends you someone that is completely off, you can get a credit back from Visage if it’s a total miss, but honestly, if we gave great detail, we found almost no misses.
• The problem we ran into was not about Visage, but our own team and outreach. Most recruiters are used to working with “Active” candidates and not cold-sourced candidates. The outreach we had to use was much more personalized and extensive than for active candidates. Once we got that straightened out, we had really great success. (I.E., you can’t send them some crappy mass email and think you’ll get responses!)

Overall

Visage is a sourcing technology that we will use again! We found the quality of candidates found for us to be of a really high match and quality. Of course, you have to put in context that you are working with passive candidates, not active, so your response rate will always be fairly low. You also have to give very specific feedback to make it all work to the best possible result.

From an investment standpoint, we figured we got a 6 to 1 ROI. For every dollar we spent with Visage, we got back 6 dollars in value for the people we hired based on the cost of hire metrics. This actually was trending higher the longer we used it as we got better in giving better feedback, and got better at our own messaging. That is a very solid ROI for recruiting technology.