Successfully recruiting passive candidates requires mastering the art of persuasion.

According to LinkedIn’s hiring statistics, only 30 percent of people are actively looking for new jobs. This means 70 percent of LinkedIn users are passive candidates who are content (or at least fairly content) in their current role. So you need to do more than post a job ad to get their attention.

You need to show passive candidates that you’ve done your research. You need to convince them that life will be tangibly better at your company.  And you need to adjust your approach to make life as convenient as possible for them in the early stages of your hiring process.

Of course, there are many different factors that can persuade passive candidates, and they vary considerably from person to person. As there is no one-size-fits-all approach, recruiting passive candidates is more of an art form than a science.  

However, there are some fundamentals that apply across the board. So to help increase your chances of getting a yes, here’s are four ways to make your opportunity stand out amongst all the noise.

1. Use video to strengthen your employer brand.

When it comes to attracting passive candidates, everything ultimately hinges on the strength of your employer brand. Its importance cannot be overstated. While the other tips in this article are helpful, they won’t be much use if your employer brand doesn’t resonate with what candidates are looking for. Keep in mind the most pressing question for every passive candidate is:

“Is this new opportunity worth leaving the security and familiarity of my current role?”

Your employer brand should convince them that the answer is a resounding “Yes”.  And the most influential tool for doing that convincing is video. Why? Because video strengthens the authenticity of your brand like no other medium.

Passive candidates don’t just have to take your word for it. They can see how great your company and culture is with their own eyes. Indeed, according to research by the Aberdeen Group, best-in-class companies are 75 percent more likely to use video tools for employer branding. This helps them grab the attention of great talent with much greater ease.  

Use video to give candidates a flavor of daily life inside your company. If often helps to feature employees talking about why they joined the company and the aspects of their job they like the most. And contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a hefty budget to make your recruitment video a reality. These days, iPhones, Go Pros, and freely available editing software are more than capable of creating a polished production.

2. Offer what their current role doesn’t.

Passive candidates are very unlikely to jump ship from their current role to take on an almost identical position somewhere else. So to ensure your opportunity catches their attention, it needs to have some unique differentiators.

When you find a candidate who’d be a great fit for one of your open roles, then it’s time to do your research. A bit of detective work should reveal at least some of the limitations of their current role. Are they likely being underpaid? Maybe the environment is a poor fit for them? Have they been pigeon-holed with limited opportunities for growth?

Once you’ve identified a specific pain point for the candidate, highlight this in your outreach. Emphasize how your role will make life easier by resolving the issue for them.

3. Invest time in genuine personalization.

Cookie-cutter outreaches save huge amounts of time. But they rarely engage passive candidates. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. Would you take time out of a busy schedule to respond to a message that looks like it’s been sent to hundreds of other people? Probably not.

Personalized messaging shows people that you care, as you’ve clearly taken the time to research them. It also significantly increases the response rate. Generic templates typically generate less than 20 percent response rate. Far from ideal.

Getting into the habit of always taking the quick and easy outreach option is terrible for the candidate experience, terrible for your employer brand, and terrible for sustainable success in recruitment. Becoming great at personalized outreach takes consistent training and practice. You won’t always get it right. But in the interest of your employer brand, it’s well worth the time investment.

4. Use video interviewing to make life more convenient.

These days, everyone is short on time. So one of the biggest challenges recruiters face when it comes to hiring passive candidates is persuading them to make time to attend an interview. In reality, only a small percentage of passive candidates are willing to make that kind of commitment early in the hiring process.

But what if you could remove the barrier to entry here? With video interviewing, you can. Candidates can record their answers to a set of predetermined questions via a video platform at a time that suits them. They can do their first stage interview from the comfort of their own home. Making the early stages of your hiring process as convenient as possible will help bring more great talent into your pipeline.

See how recruiting is taking a page from sales’ playbook by adapting strategies to keep talent pools stocked with prospects.

No recruiter likes hurrying candidates through the hiring process, and no candidate wants to feel they’ll never hear from that recruiter again. These kinds of negative experiences directly affect a candidate’s impression of a company’s image, and companies need to take notice. Forty-two percent of candidates claim a poor experience would prevent them from applying to another position at a company, and 22 percent say they’d tell their friends not to bother.

At the same time, 82 percent of working professionals admit to being open to new work opportunities. Capturing their interest requires proactive strategies and a standout employer brand. Candidates open to new opportunities want to see measurable value in another company, something organizations communicate through their Employee Value Propositions (EVPs). The task of engaging passive candidates, measuring their readiness, and converting them to active applicants falls on recruiters.

One practice that talent acquisition borrowed from sales is Candidate Relationship Management (CRM), a tool becoming increasingly popular among TA professionals. With current numbers suggesting that a majority of the workforce is open to new job opportunities, recruiters and hiring managers are charged with managing a healthy recruitment function, and a CRM model ensures that businesses have an engaged, enthusiastic, and high-impact talent pipeline ahead of demand.

Rather than letting candidates slip through the cracks, a CRM model allows recruiters to make good on their promise to revisit and reconsider candidates who may have been passed over previously. This turns the recruitment function from a one-off execution into a relationship-building model that nurtures passive candidates over time. Speaking to SAP, Kyle Lagunas, Research Manager of Emerging TA Trends & Technologies at IDC, said that “by embedding candidate relationship management functionality into the core recruiting offering, candidate relationship management becomes an organic part of the talent acquisition operation — and this is proving to be a key driver of adoption.”

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS), for example, offers recruiters an overview of where active candidates are in the hiring process. Within the platform, integrated CRM technology automates communication processes with talent pools and pipeline, creating workflows that speed up recruiter efficiency, encourage candidate engagement, and improving their connection to an organization. If an ATS is crucial for sourcing and tracking candidates, then CRM is vital for long-term relationships that lead to faster, better placements in higher numbers.

At the most basic level, CRM helps shape candidates’ impressions of—and interactions with—an organization. Recruiters can use CRM to:

• Build personalized talent communities, organized, sorted, and managed to retain high-quality talent
• Organize and manage large recruitment campaigns
• Build custom career pages
• Create targeted campaigns to capture interest and assess candidates’ readiness to convert
• Build and deliver branded email, social, and web campaigns
• Share impactful content (i.e. videos or employee testimonials)

Each touchpoint is another opportunity to build rapport, increase talent pools, and maintain passive candidates. Recruiters who maintain their talent pools with CRM strategies know their candidates’ levels of interest, and can easily categorize their skills, experience, and education to make data-driven hiring decisions. And because CRM nurtures strong relationships with past, current, and future candidates, speed and efficiency are built in when it’s time to hire.

Today, it’s a different story.

Behind the idea of the passive candidate is the notion is that if someone is happy, they are engaged in their work. This may not be the case. Perhaps they are comfortable and in a cushy situation, which is why they don’t want to leave. Sometimes (in my experience, often) someone who fits the “passive” profile is not the most engaged employee. Passive doesn’t necessarily mean better.

Active job seekers (like much of the LinkedIn crowd, except for the recruiters) may be looking because they don’t feel valued. Many people on LinkedIn are actively interested in making a job change; having an impressive profile is an alternative to shopping their resumes. Does this mean they are truly passive candidates? They may be bored. They may feel their talent is wasted. I know of a data architect who left her last job because she felt the leadership team didn’t have its act together. She decided they were wasting her time! She is now “unemployed,” but, not for long. She’s the real deal!

Unemployed doesn’t mean inferior. It may mean that the employer is unimaginative about how to effectively deploy talent or worse, perhaps the managers, who have been there too long, are incompetent. Depending on your generation, you may see Greg Smith (“Why I’m Leaving Goldman Sachs” ) as a hero or a rat, but I very much doubt that he is incompetent.

When companies have massive layoffs, do you think it’s the employees who are incompetent, or those who are responsible for developing and implementing a competitive strategy? What does it say about talent innovation when companies choose to outsource rather than invest in their people? We can do better.

While passive candidates are not a “bad” thing, they are not necessarily superior candidates for employment. Many players in the talent acquisition ecosystem have economic incentives to promote passive candidates as the preferred choice. Recruiters who get paid for placing talent have less competition when presenting someone who isn’t actively looking, but wise employers will use objective measures to assess ALL applicants to choose the best. They will cast a wide net and seek out diverse sources of talent.

Pat Sharp, The Talent Architect blends strategy, technology tools, and assessment tools with marketing magic to create unique talent solutions. Past and current clients include: Motorola, Deloitte, TiVo, and Cloudscaling. Visit The Talent Architect or drop her a line at pat@thetalentarchitect.com. Photo Credit MyPencil.
 

As a recruiter and hiring manager we walk a fine line trying to balance relationships with our candidate pool while also looking out for the company where we work and represent. Someone hiring often often spends time in their current databases mining for qualified candidates. But more often than not, someone hiring takes the easy route posting, reposting, listing and promoting an job opening throughout the web.

There is no doubt that prospecting and mining qualified yet passive candidates takes work. However, you don’t have to spend all day to be a sourcing master.  Candidates are often in places and communities you’ve likely overlooked.

• References. If your candidate pool has provided a list of professional references, these are a great place to start mining for passive candidates who may just fit the bill. A quick phone call or an examination of their online profile can help level the playing field.

• Employee Referrals. I have found that when providing an employee incentive as part of a company referral program, can yield positive results.  Employees tap into their personal networks providing a realistic review of your company’s culture, expectations, and the job.  Employee recommendations also to have lower turnover, as opposed to hires from other sources. A simple $500 incentive program with 50% of the referrals bonus provided on the day the referral was hired, as well as their 90^th day, can lower cost per hire, and in my experience produce better quality candidates than other sources.

• Your Current Database. Putting together a value-based distribution list and community of past job seeker candidates can yield positive results. Not every job seeker is the right fit for you but using an employee referral based strategy. AT&T has used their Talent Community to successfully build talent pools by providing helpful tips, hints, and resources available to their database of active and passive job seekers. A simple email newsletter with an opportunity to opt in with an ATS can foster relationships beyond your first level candidate connection.

 
Candidate sourcing and building relationships doesn’t have to be a large and involved task. With a little creativity and value-based relationships, you can build a strong community, providing a steady string of qualified candidates with minimal effort.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers. Photo Credit The Digerati Life.

• Provide Resources. Passive candidates can become the champions for your organization when you provide them with valuable resources, information, insights into the organization, and best practices. These tips could be in the form of white papers, blog posts, or even videos. Companies like RackSpace provide their job seekers with an intimate look into the culture of the where they work. Their Racker Talent blog has led to less candidates but more qualified candidates. Go beyond the typical Careers page and provide your candidates more information instead of less.

• Referral Programs. Some say it takes a village to raise a child. Think social. I like to think it takes an entire organization to court a candidate. Social referral programs matter. Give your current employee incentives as well as resources to recruit for you. Referral programs provide candidates more insights and a better understand of the job and organization saving you turnover and hiring costs in the long term.

• Make It Easy. Your top passive candidates aren’t trolling the job boards or spending 45 minutes to complete an online application with your ATS. Use creative strategies to help keep them engaged with text job alerts or allowing for engagement opportunities with recruiters or HR professionals within an organization. Much like a customer service virtual chat, you can allow for candidates to easily ask questions during scheduled hours of recruiting Q&A.

Depending on your industry and company, it’s important to remember that all candidates regardless of active or passive can be potential customers or candidate referral generators. They are members of your local community or industry. These candidates are likely to recommend companies to their friends and family based on their own experiences with your recruiting process.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers.

Photo Credit Business Insider

Free Software Forever. Signup for SmartRecruiters Free Recruiting Software.