How to recruit passive candidates

Fishing where the fish are 

It might sound obvious but consider where your ideal hires might spend their time online? Chances are that it won’t be on a job board and in the current market where employment is at an all-time high, the very best hires may not even be registered on one.

Ask colleagues where their friends, network, and industry peers spend their time online, as it will vary from one hire to another. Social Media is a good place to start but some professional forums online can also be very active. Some professionals spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, but others rarely spend time on it. It will vary between demographics too, but this is where you can start to use people power to amplify your marketing and messaging reach.

Harnessing employees to reach passive candidates 

Consider this, most of us who have a social media account have on average 400 connections. Multiply this by the number of people that work for your business (or even just the department where you need to hire) and the potential target audience you could reach via your employees is incredible!

There are tools out there to help with this but in its most basic form, you can ask employees to like and share your content across your social platforms. You could even offer incentives and awards to colleagues that share the most content for you!

What content to share 

Simply posting jobs might gain some responses but think of it another way. You wouldn’t ask a date back to your place the first time you’ve met! You have to establish a know, like, and trust relationship and make a connection first.  

Ways you can do this is to share content and information that will appeal to them and capture their interest in you as a future employer. Some examples include: 

• Employee stories (video or images will gain most engagement) 
• Articles, guides, or research which are relevant to them, or your industry 
• Major company news – expansion, funding, new products and services may all capture some interest. 

Keep it real and keep it consistent 

It is likely that you’ll already have a constant feed of news and content that would be of interest to potential hires. It’s important to have a clear plan for what will be shared and when and stick to it.

When sharing workplace stories or even videos from colleagues, they don’t need to be highly produced and super slick. In fact, many people prefer a video that isn’t scripted and maybe isn’t movie quality and all of this can be produce using your phone and doesn’t require expensive investment.  

Let candidates come to you and build your network

When sharing content, make it very easy for potential hires to engage with you. Share links on your content that lead to a simple form on your careers site to ‘join our talent network’ (or something similar). Here they can give you some basic information, including the types of roles, locations, and salary they might be interested in, perhaps their CV and a link to their LinkedIn profile and if they want to receive news, job alerts or both. They are now in your hiring funnel!

You can then use this information to segment your talent network and send each group more targeted content but again, make sure it’s relevant and keep it consistent. Include links back to your LinkedIn and/or Facebook and Instagram pages, company website, job openings, and invite them to sign-up for job alerts (if they haven’t done so already). Your ATS should be able to manage this aspect for you and manage communication via email and text message too. 

The important thing is to give members of your talent network options on how they want to engage and hear from you.  

Rethink what a passive candidate is!

If you use an applicant tracking system (a recruitment platform to solve hiring!) you’ll have a whole database of people you’ve previously engaged with or met on some level. Many may not have been a fit for your business, but many could still be future hires. Create talent pools of those you’ve had applications from and interviewed and engage with these groups in the same way. If they’ve had a positive recruitment experience (even though they weren’t successful) it’s likely they’ll still be keen to join you in the future.

This doesn’t just apply to candidates but also those that used to work for you – your alumni! They know your brand better than anyone, some may return one day, and others may simply be happy to share your content or opportunities with their networks too! 

Final thoughts 

The basic principles behind reaching and engaging with passive talent are straightforward and whilst there’s some impressive tech and very talented employer brand experts out there, but if budgets are a challenge, it is still possible to plan and execute a passive talent engagement strategy with little investment.

Whatever your approach, consider carefully what will most interest, engage and, even excite the potential hires you’re looking to reach!