Candidates: Are you interviewing and need support?
Candidates: Are you interviewing and need support?
In 2018, most job seekers are passive. With unemployment at record lows in 9 states (and 17-year lows across the board), most people who want a job have a job.
Engaging and hiring passive candidates is crucial for recruiting to fill the roles it needs to. Passive candidates are candidates who are already employed. They are not actively searching for a job.
There are any number of reasons an employee at another organization would want to leave and join yours. Many of them - bad management, uncompetitive salary, long commute times - are outside of your control.
We’re going to focus on the things you can control - or at least take advantage of. Generally speaking, you can conceptualize passive job seekers as falling into one of two buckets:
These candidates aren’t doing any new-job research whatsoever.
Recruiting content passive candidates requires specific, direct outreach. (Unlike discontent passive candidates, which we’ll look at in a bit).
Referrals are consistently rated the best source of high quality hires. With record unemployment, they will be more important than ever.
Sites like LinkedIn make it easy to find employees in your organization who are already connected with the people you want to hire. If possible, ask them to reach out and open up lines of communication.
This becomes even easier if your company has a referral bonus program in place.
If your organization has access to a service like Pitchbook or LexisNexis, you can track mergers and acquisitions in your area. Any M&A comes with some degree of uncertainty; it’s the perfect time to intrigue perfectly content high performers at these companies.
Employees at organizations undergoing a merger or acquisition are much more likely to consider a new role, even if they were previously very content at their current company.
At any given time, only 33% of employees are engaged at work. This means at least 66% of employees should hear you out.
There’s a big difference between a content employee and a fulfilled employee. All other factors being equal (compensation, benefits, etc), a strong company mission and value proposition will intrigue passive candidates who aren’t totally engaged at work.
Show that it’s more rewarding to work for you with a formal value proposition that advertises what sets you apart. This might include:
Anything else that makes your organization unique.
According to a study by Universum, 67% of organizations with 10,000+ employees have a formalized employer value proposition. Articulating that value proposition is key to intriguing content, passive candidates. Your focus should be different depending on what candidate persona you’re trying to attract.
Discontent passive candidates are a little different.
Whereas attracting content passive candidates usually requires targeted outreach, discontent passive candidates can be brought into the funnel with a more “inbound” approach.
In other words: you can recruit these passive candidates passively.
There are numerous technologies that automate a great degree of the sourcing process. Tools like Entelo and hiQ pull data from social networks like LinkedIn to identify potential applicants and automate outreach.
Potential applicants are identified by a number of factors, like how well their work experience meets the position’s requirements and how likely they are to leave their current role.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of ranking highly in search engine results (usually Google).
There’s a ton you can optimize here to ensure passive candidates find you:
We put together a huge guide around optimizing your job posts for Google for Jobs - find it here.
What do gas stations, clothing stores, and Amazon have in common? They make it easy to buy on impulse.
Make it easy for passive candidates to apply on impulse. Maybe they find your job posting after a particularly frustrating day of work, or just received one of the aforementioned automated outreach emails. Just like a clothing store has a limited time to convince you that an impulse buy is justified, you might have a limited timeframe to convince a potential applicant that applying is worth it.
In the Talent Board’s survey of over 200,000 candidates, only 20% said their application took less than 15 minutes to complete. How many impulse buys would Amazon facilitate if buyers needed to complete a 30 minute survey before seeing the product?
Depending on your ATS, there may not be a whole lot of wiggle room to customize and refine your job application.
In these cases you can lower the barrier to entry by moving a recorded video introduction to the front of the hiring process. Rather than complete a long application, job seekers can introduce themselves, their skills & abilities, and why they are interested in working for you with a short video introduction. Your recruiters can then point them in the direction of the right application - by this point they should be more invested in you as a potential employer.
Realistically, there’s some overlap here. While the most effective recruiting approaches for each type of passive candidate might be different, there is some crossover in their application.
For instance, automated sourcing tools will also reach out to content passive candidates - the outreach is just more likely to be ignored. Depending on your goals (time to hire, quality of hire, etc) and resources (number of recruiters actively sourcing, budget for recruiting tech, etc), the most effective combination of approaches will vary.
Understanding what type of passive candidate you want to prioritize is key to developing the right strategy to target them.