Article: How to approach Active and Passive candidates

Talent Acquisition

How to approach Active and Passive candidates

Active candidates sell while passive candidates need to be sold to. Read more to know how to attract active and passive candidates.
How to approach Active and Passive candidates

When was the last time that your organization hired a new candidate? Surely that wouldn’t have been long ago. But how do recruiters reach out to candidates? There cannot be a one size fits all method to approach candidates with job opportunities. Like any other business communication, understanding the different types of candidates and your business needs is central to yield the desired results.

Understanding the candidates

The first step to understanding the candidates in the talent pool is to categorize them as active and passive job seekers. Job seekers who are actively looking for a job can easily be recognized by the frequency of updates they perform on their resumes in job boards, job communities, and interactions in LinkedIn. Typical passive job seekers will not demonstrate hurry in seeking a job. However, they will entertain calls for potential job offers, evaluate each of them and choose the best one to ring in the epoch change in careers. In between these two categories, there also exist two more categories – Tiptoers, who will not apply directly but seek out referrals from friends to move on to other jobs and Super passive job-seekers who prefer to stay rooted to their present jobs and don’t want to move.

Active Candidates Sell and Passive Candidates Are Sold to

Active candidates take concrete steps to market their expertise related to the required job roles while a passive candidates need to be influenced by a strong value proposition for the job opportunity.The value proposition needs to communicate the “what’s in it for them” factor and focus on enhancing their skills and improving their experience. 

Approaching Candidates: Once the candidates have been understood, a proper methodology of approaching them based on available channels and the business needs should be identified. Here are a few steps that can help you in your endeavor. 

Marketing your Brand: Similar to organizations, candidates also conduct a background check of the company they are applying for. This puts the onus on the organization to project itself as a friendly and affable place to work. Communication media like social networks, print advertisements, and outreach messages are potential channels that could be leveraged to create a strong employer brand. Creating brand ambassadors from within the organization is equally important for the word of mouth branding.

Social Media Presence: The importance of social networks to carry forward and magnify company’s brand cannot be ruled out. Soliciting talent for jobs along with a robust brand management on the social platforms can get maximum attention. Both active and passive candidates use these media to apply or check on the company. 

Proactive Sourcing: Social networks, job posts, and binary searches are some of the methods by which one can proactively source candidates whether active or passive. 

Employee Referral Program (ERP): Active candidates, tiptoers, and passive candidates reach out to their friends in other companies for roles that will suit their profile. Having a robust ERP will net quality talent on the virtue of the talent being known to an existing employee. 

Network: Recruiters today realize that the war of talent is over and talent has emerged as the winner. Hence, like customers to any organization, it is extremely important for the recruiters to network with the candidates to identify more interested candidates. Using the networking skills, even if candidates reject an opportunity, they may refer a friend of theirs who may fit the bill. This will help in building a database of profiles. 

It’s the right hiring that matters. Using the right channel for the right category of candidates will not only help the organizations tap the candidates more effectively, it will also help in improving the speed, quality and cost of hires.  With the advent of technology and social media, the journey from attracting the candidates to engaging them to hire them has now become a science. Using the bevy of software and analytics to conduct a contextual search and demand-supply mapping can ensure identification of the right talent for the right role in your organization keeping in mind your business objectives.

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, #TalentScience

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