Attracting the best candidates to your business is crucial for ensuring your company remains competitive. But the best candidates are not always the ones actively searching for a new role. In fact, these passive candidates who are not currently job hunting represent a rich stream of valuable talent.
The question is, how do you find them? How do you use your talent acquisition strategy to engage with an outstanding hire when the potential candidate isn’t even looking for a job?
Today, we’ll explore why reaching out to passive talent is so crucial and the best strategies for doing so.
What is a Passive Candidate?
A passive candidate is a person who may be open to a new role, but is not currently taking steps to find a job.
Unlike active job seekers, who busily scour recruitment adverts and apply to job openings in search of new opportunities, passive talent is more likely to be satisfied with their current position.
However, that’s not to say they can’t be convinced to move to greener pastures (that’s your company).
Research shows that US employees leave their jobs for various reasons.
So, if you have something different to offer or can meet workers’ shifting needs—such as giving them a better work-life balance, unique benefits, or growth opportunities—chances are passive talent will be open to a discussion.
But your passive recruitment process should be tactful. You must develop strategies to find and approach these potential candidates and convince them of the benefits of joining your company in a way that aligns with your hiring goals.
Why Passive Candidates Matter
There are countless recruitment statistics that show passive talent is incredibly valuable for an organization. And with 70% of job seekers considered passive candidates, you have no shortage of options when it comes to finding talent.
It may be that these individuals have unique skills or personal qualities that will help your business grow. Or perhaps they have more diverse experiences and ideas that will lead to greater innovation in your company.
If you want to remain competitive in any field, you need a team who can help you stand out. Whether you’re short on resources or want to diversify your workforce and have very specific criteria, engaging with passive candidates can help you achieve those goals.
The strategy is much like using account based marketing tools in that you take a targeted, personalized approach to each candidate. So, rather than running a standard recruitment campaign, where you might post job advertisements to the masses on traditional channels, you contact passive candidates one-to-one.
This more targeted approach saves your business time and money while helping you find a candidate whose skills and experience more closely match your requirements.
6 Strategies for Engaging Passive Candidates
Alarmingly, only one-third of US employees are actively engaged in their roles. These employees represent an opportunity for your recruitment team to find suitable hires through passive recruiting.
Let’s look at how you can capitalize on this trend and source valuable, skilled workers who can help your business thrive.
1. Show off your brand
The first thing a potential candidate will likely do is check out your company online. So you need to build an employer brand that makes a strong first impression. You want to present your company as a quality employer that matches passive candidates’ career aspirations and values, if not exceeds them.
Ensure consistency in your messaging and visuals across all touchpoints where potential candidates are likely to encounter or engage with your brand. That includes your website landing page, blogs, email, and social media platforms such as X, Instagram, YouTube, and Linkedin.
Consider potential interactions between the passive candidate and your business and assess what impression you are making.
These touchpoints are key areas for telling your brand’s story and showing what it’s like working for your company.
Blogs, videos, and posts are useful ways to talk about individual roles and responsibilities within your business. Include testimonials and interviews with existing employees, and use photos and videos to show what physical workspaces are like to highlight what a great environment your employees get to work in.
If you want professional assistance with creating high-quality video content, consider partnering with a video marketing agency to ensure your brand message is clear and engaging.
Make sure the content you produce showcases your company culture and values as you want them to be seen and understood by potential candidates. Ask management and HR to explain your approach to employee relations and outline the mission and objectives of the company.
Continuously track the impact your online presence has to make sure your branding hits the right notes and your company is visible online. Tools like website visitor tracking software will help you keep tabs on website traffic, while social media tools will help you gauge audience demographic and engagement.
2. Leverage Online Platforms and Social Media
In a recent survey by Gallup, 50% of US employees who had been recently recruited said that they had been contacted by prospective employers through online professional networks like LinkedIn. It shows how important leveraging professional and social media platforms can be in sourcing potential employees.
These platforms are particularly useful as you can search for specialized expertise and job titles, read endorsements and dive into someone’s work history. It’s also very easy to contact potential candidates through platforms’ dedicated messaging apps.
But it’s not just professional sites that are useful for passive recruiting. Conventional social media platforms are also valuable. For example, Facebook has a targeted search feature that you can use to find individuals with particular skills or work experience.
Likewise, you can search X and Instagram according to professions or sectors or add relevant hashtags to content, whether it’s video interviews with staff, clips from your virtual team building sessions, or behind the scenes project work. Doing this attracts potential future employees to your profile, increasing passive candidates’ awareness of your company and brand.
But social media platforms aren’t just for finding and contacting passive candidates. It’s also useful for sharing engaging content and news about your business that can interest and entice potential new hires as part of your employer branding strategy.
You can also use employee-generated content, letting staff advocate for your business on social media. Posting on their own accounts, they might describe what they love about their jobs or highlight recent achievements at work. This type of content can be very engaging and persuasive, but make sure it’s genuine.
Having got the attention of a passive candidate, the next step is to craft professional outreach emails using cold email automation (more on automation later) to ensure you maximize the chances of hooking them.
3. Use AI tools to Find Talent
As you’ll be aware, automation and AI are providing a huge boost to the hiring process, with tools such as Oleeo recruitment automation helping HR teams to screen and process candidates more efficiently. These same tools can also help you source passive candidates.
Additionally, implementing a custom chatbot can further enhance your recruitment process by automating initial interactions and answering frequently asked questions from potential candidates, helping to engage passive talent more effectively.
AI tools can help you to identify, screen, and match candidates to job specs, speeding up your ability to find and contact potential new employees. These tools can integrate with your existing systems to find internal employees who match the candidate profile. They also harvest online information, scouring job boards and other external sources to identify people who match your search criteria.
That means the time you would’ve spent trawling through networks can be automatically done in the background. This frees the team up to focus on the things they do best, such as crafting interview questions.
4. Encourage Referrals
Your HR team can sing your company’s praises as much as they like. But hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth is often more effective. Current employees who endorse or recommend your business as a great place to work can be very persuasive.
Encouraging referrals also leverages your employees’ own personal network of connections and professional contacts, helping expand your reach to more passive candidates.
This can happen organically, but you might also consider a referral program. Brainstorm ways to encourage and even incentivize employees to refer your company to their contacts. They might do this by posting on social media, through word of mouth, or even connecting your HR department directly.
Companies that have used this tactic successfully include property insurance company PURE, who asks new hires about other people they feel are a good fit for the company in their first few weeks. Salesforce is also known for adopting this strategy, operating Recruitment Happy Hours where current employees can invite people they want to prefer for an informal evening with the company.
Whatever strategy you take, make sure referrals are genuine and reward them when a hire is successful.
5. Personalize Every Contact
As you’re making contact out of the blue, it’s essential that you personalize messages with a potential hire. Whether you’re emailing or sending an in-app message on social media, the content should be enticing and persuasive while still being professional and not overly promotional. Your aim is to pique their interest and gain trust to begin a conversation.
This includes crafting a compelling subject line of your email, which can make a significant difference in getting your message noticed.
Make it clear that you have specifically chosen to contact this individual. Show that you’ve done your homework in terms of researching their skills and experience and explain how they align with the job opening you have in mind for them.
Make sure you get all the essentials right, too. Simple mistakes like misspelling someone’s name or using the wrong pronoun can create a negative impression.
After your initial outreach, there will hopefully be an opportunity to speak to a potential hire, whether this is over the phone or in person. Ensure you have an efficient method and system for contacting candidates by phone and that these conversations are also personalized.
If your team is remote or the candidate is based abroad, consider tools like Vonage cloud based calling. This allows you to make phone calls over the internet and is more reliable, so gives a positive and professional impression.
6. Offer Good Working Conditions and Unique Benefits
As we touched on earlier, more US employees are leaving their companies in search of better working conditions. For some people that might mean having the flexibility to work from home twice a week, while others may be more interested in the company culture. Benefits such as personal insurance plans or technology reimbursement schemes can be a decisive factor for many too.
Remember, passive candidates aren’t actively job seeking and may be happy, if not comfortable, at their current role. The working conditions you offer could be what seals the deal for them.
Show off any relevant innovations at your company. If you’re using the latest B2B marketing platforms, explain how that has directly benefited your marketing team. If you offer your IT team training on data security, outline the certifications on offer.
A clear and visible path to progression is important for potential hires when considering an offer to join your company. A candidate will want to see what growth opportunities you can provide before seriously considering the role.
You can further demonstrate value by offering an employee reward scheme. If you look at employee recognition statistics, it’s clear that employees value being recognized for their contributions. Rewarding employees can significantly improve their satisfaction and morale, increasing the chances that they’ll advocate for your business and bring in more passive candidates in the future.
Conclusion
Finding passive candidates isn’t always straightforward. It requires a different approach to the broad and more conventional hiring process.
Remember, passive candidates aren’t necessarily looking for a new role, so the onus is on the recruiter to seek them out and persuade them that they should apply for an open position. As an employer, you have to sell the company initially and persuade the candidate that you’re what that individual needs for their career.
As such, your business must adopt a coherent and targeted strategy to attract and draw in passive candidates.
Start by reviewing your company branding — what do you want prospective candidates to know about you? How do you want them to perceive you?
Then, leverage technology to help you find and contact potential hires, personalizing your communication with them to make interactions more engaging. Make sure your company is a genuinely great place to work so satisfied employees will naturally advocate for your company, attracting more passive talent that will boost your workforce.
The post 6 Key Strategies to Attract and Engage Passive Candidates appeared first on Apollo Technical LLC.