C#8 of Social Recruiting: Conversion — Socializing applicants lost in corporate repositories

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed:

 C#1 Continuity,

C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding,

C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility,

C#4 Courtesy and Candidate Centricity,

C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions and

C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires

C#7 Content Marketing — Addressing real people

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Over the years, your company has accumulated a lot of information about potential candidates. Most of them have applied for a job you posted months or years ago — but they never heard back from your company, because for one reason or another, they were filtered out of the top of the pile.

Socialize 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.

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 cases, TalentCircles automatically creates a profile for these candidates. Once these candidates are imported, you can send them an email offering them to opt into your talent network. While opting into your network, they 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 are still (or again) interested in your company — which means that you do not have to re-source them.

Socializing past candidates is interesting in two ways:

• First, you can save significant money through this "inside sourcing" strategy.
• Secondly, this gives you an idea of the actual value of your dormant assets, and enables you to assess your social footprint. If a lower percentage of past applicants respond to your call, you can ask yourself a few important questions:

o   Were these past candidates just looking for a job and not especially interested in joining your company?

o   Are these applicants upset at your company because you did not bother to connect with them at the time they applied?

Mixed results can be extremely useful: Most of the time, they will mean that you have to address a brand deficit and put special efforts into a more proactive social recruiting strategy. Even if you are very new in social sourcing, start now — because you are not late at all in social recruiting.