The Art of Lean HR (Part 2): Leveraging Past Applicants

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

On a previous post, we discussed a lean approach to talent acquisition: Eliminating Waste by reducing the drop-out rate of candidates who come to your website (sometimes up to 90% of those candidates). Today we discuss another way to eliminating waste: By enabling you to leverage extremely valuable assets, past applicants.

Over the years, your company has accumulated a lot of information about potential candidates. Most of them applied for a job you posted months or years back — but they never heard back from your company, because for one reason or another, they were filtered out of the top of the pile. What if you started to take a closer look at these people who were quietly stored away on your traditional corporate repositories (ATS, CRMs, or other databases), in countless folders on your desktop, in Outlook, or in boxes of papers?

A new dimension of "Inside sourcing" is about the art of leveraging this huge pool of untapped potential. Past candidates may have gained valuable experience since they originally applied and can be interesting candidates for today’s open positions or great connectors to other talent through their own networks. They sometimes represent huge investments that you may over the past few years.

Just calculate... Information about past applicants obtained from various means represent significant acquisition costs. Although these costs vary depending on the company and the type of talent sought, an empirical analysis performed by Marty Brack and published by ERE in December 2009, shows that the average cost per resume through LinkedIn (which is the least expensive source) is $18. Based on this number, the value of 20,000 resumes is $360,000. Supposing that all these resumes are of lower quality or related to easy to find talent and of no higher value than a regular "like" on a Facebook page by unqualified leads usually estimated to be $3, the value of these resumes is still $60,000, which is not trivial for cost-conscious organizations.

TalentCircles enables you to leverage these valuable assets at a negligible cost by allowing you to:

• Mass import the candidates' records stored in a corporate repository (CRM, ATS, or any other database).
• Import electronic or paper resumes.

In all these cases, TalentCircles automatically creates a profile for the candidates. Once these candidates are imported, you can send an email to these candidates offering them to opt into your talent network. While opting into your network, candidates can use their favorite Social login, which helps you keep their contact information up-to-date. At least a portion of these candidates will be telling you that they still (or again) interested in your company — which means that you do not have to re-source them.

The ROI is clear...  especially considering that this capability of TalentCircles is just a small feature of the platform! The immediate benefits are obvious too. By doing so, you:

• Expand your live corporate Rolodex;
• Show candidates that you care by inviting them to opt into your network (and eventually make them forget their disappointment about the fact that you didn't interact with them when they originally connected with you).

For more information, request our white papers:

— TalentCircles: ROI of a talent engagement platform

— TalentCircles: Leveraging Past Applicants

Send an email to : info@talentcircles.com

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[1] http://www.ere.net/2009/12/02/just-one-look-at-cost-per-resume/