How to Capture the Power of Passive Recruiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The best candidates have options. They also research for their next career opportunity long before applying for a single job posting. These candidates aren’t looking to make a lateral move in their career and will search high and low before accepting their next job offer. To recruit the best of the passive job seekers it’s important to build a strong funnel of passive candidates and help them throughout their “buying” decision.

Passive recruiting is important for multiple reasons. First, when a job seeker is passively looking at other opportunities it means that they’re not happy with something that’s going on in the workplace. It may be they’re not being compensated fairly, they’re not being challenged enough, or there might not be room for career growth. Secondly, they’re generally looking at one of their competitors for their next job. They already know the market and they want a place to grow, what better then for them to look for a competitor. Same industry, same type of work, but a better work environment!

Having a talent community for these passive job seekers to go and learn will make their buying decision that much easier when they’re ready to make the leap. The key is to make sure candidates receive the right information and data to make the buying decision to apply with your company when the passive candidate becomes an active one. By utilizing a talent community you’re able to nurture the candidate.

The Talent Pipeline and Recruiting Funnel featured above is like marketing and sales in that it is focused on relationships and qualifying the funnel of candidates through resources, interactions, and information. When dealing with passive candidates it’s important to hit all three points of engagement. Utilizing a talent community like Talent Circles allows you to see all your candidates in one place and put out specific information about your company, basically wooing them and helping the overall buying decision of the passive candidate.

In order for one to have a successful talent community they must do the following:

Provide resources
For a talent community to work you must start providing a reason for the job seeker to stay and be active. Providing resources and information on what makes a great hire for your company will allow these job seekers real knowledge on how to gain employment at your company.

Give access to recruiters
Recruiters are no longer the veiled wizard. Put your recruiters on the front lines in your talent community. Having a few recruiters available to answer questions will allow keep them around longer. Talent communities should at all costs avoid terrible communication issues between a candidate and the recruiting team.

Passive recruiting takes an entirely new approach because these job seekers aren’t necessarily ready to make the move. In order to capture the best of the best it’s important that you invite and interact with these job seekers just as much as the active ones. Keeping the lines of communication open will give your recruiters the one up on a candidate when they turn from a passive job seeker to an active one. Using a talent community is the perfect tool to do just that.

Looking for the perfect talent community? Request a demo of TalentCircles.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell.