It has been said the companies work with recruiters in one of two ways: Either recruiters bring top talent in through the front door or they take it through the back door.

Most recruiting firms look at contact records as being the most valuable sources of information in their database. They use these to track candidates, clients, and sales contacts for potential leads. However, by deliberately and strategically capturing information on and coding data at the company level, recruiters can expand their search capabilities.

At the corporate level we often think of market competitors. Who are the companies that compete against each other for the same customers? However as recruiters, we deal with companies who are talent competitors. Talent competitors compete for the same pool of candidates.

By thinking in terms of structuring companies by the types of talent they seek and hire, we as recruiters can target specific companies to recruit from or to market to.

When speaking to a hiring manager or having a discovery call regarding a new opportunity always ask: “What companies have you successfully hired from in the past, or which organizations have your top hires come from historically?”

Follow this question up by soliciting a list of potential source companies. That your hiring manager would like to see candidates from. When having this conversation, dig deep, hiring authorities often have not thought about this concept previously and think in terms of active candidates or applicants as opposed to deliberately and strategically recruiting out of companies that currently employ the types of talent that fit best for their organization.

You may need to prompt the hiring manager by suggesting competitors or other companies that compete for similar talent. Use these suggestions to build a list a 5 to 10 target companies.

Once you have identified the organizations your client would be interested in recruiting from, approach the same question from the inverse perspective. Ask your hiring manager for specific companies or organizations they would not like to recruit or hire from.

Again, you may need to prompt the discussion to identify specific company names. This question can uncover organizations that may be off limits do to being your client’s customer or vendor in addition to having a contrary business culture.

As you begin to ask these sorts of questions and dive deep into the types of organizations that compete for similar talent you may notice that certain patterns arise. These patterns will begin to form the basis for tagging company records by industry.

External Industry categorization is often an overly broad way to organize data, but by understanding the types of organizations that seek to hire the same types of talent, you can develop a custom classification system that provides you with a more tangible and usable way to search and identify companies in your database.

Similarly, look to tag companies by the types of skills, certifications, or processes they hire for. This can be valuable both for source and client company records. By coding source companies, you are better able to specifically target the companies you with to recruit from who currently have an employee base with the desired skillsets, in addition to quickly identifying specific organizations to market a candidate to.

With enough time recruiting in your industry, much of this knowledge becomes internalized; however, new recruiters to your team may not have the same depth of understanding. If you are a tenured recruiter, take the time to codify the information you have learned within your CRM and dramatically decrease the ramp-up or onboarding for new hires!