How to Recruit Passive Candidates and Why You Should

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The definition of a passive candidate is a person who is not currently seeking employment or at least is not actively pursuing any new opportunities. It may seem counterintuitive to target this demographic of the workforce, but there are some distinct advantages to hiring from this group. Often, the best people are already filling a position with someone, and this means the potential for new hires has a lower ceiling than if your recruiting solutions were to draw from all skilled persons instead of just those looking. Here are four benefits of recruiting passive candidates.

  • Largest segment of the labor force: Passive candidates make up the majority of the workforce by a factor of at least 2-to-1, and the gap in this ratio has continued to widen in recent years.
  • No competition: They likely will not be interviewed by another interested party since they are not actively looking.
  • Specialization: Passive candidates have the greatest potential to fill roles that are highly specialized due to their current responsibilities keeping them up to date on best practices and new techniques.
  • They are hungry to get established: Polls consistently demonstrate that passive prospects are more than twice as likely to want to have an impact and over 50% more likely to want their company culture to suit their personality.

Changes in the Market

The job market today is vastly different than in decades past when it comes to finding new employees. It was not uncommon to see people looking for work lined up at a company’s front door, but recruiters now must have a way of finding the right choice amid a host of individuals already engaged with another job. It is critical to understand how to approach this set of skilled resources to efficiently enable yourself to appeal to their sensibilities, which are very different than their active counterparts. One example of this is that these passive candidates do not feel the pressure to find something nearly as quickly since they already have an income. Several methods to streamline the location and contact process include the following.

  • Social media recruiting: Social media platforms witness the largest portion of the population frequenting their sites than any other retailer or entertainment provider.
  • Text recruiting: The technology of today is held in the hand, and that is where recruiters looking to make a quality connection need to direct their efforts if they want to be taken seriously by the digital generations.
  • Direct referrals: The most successful form of advertising is through word-of-mouth, and every business already has an excellent resource in its employees to reach out to their contacts.

Make It Easy

Someone who does not need a new job is not necessarily unwilling to entertain the idea of new opportunities. You can keep tabs on the status of the conversations with different potential candidates by implementing applicant tracking. There are numerous advantages to this kind of recruitment system that can be tweaked even further to make the process seem nearly effortless for both sides.