Companies seeking to purchase a new applicant tracking software are often looking for ways to improve current processes, and become more efficient. A recent demo participant told us:
“We want to seek out passive candidates who haven’t applied, but may be interested in one of our positions and make it easy for those people to engage with us.”
During the software demonstration I asked them what they were doing right now to attract passive candidates. What was working for them? As it turns out, they had a large collection of resumes, but with a small HR department of two people, there was not a lot of active outreach going on. They posted their available jobs to Indeed.com when the openings became availale. Indeed is their number one source of candidates.
But those are “active” candidates, selecting and choosing to apply to an open position. The company wanted to become more proactive rather than reactive, and build a talent pipeline so they could hire more efficiently, and hopefully reduce time to hire metrics.
After reviewing their current practices, we made the following suggestions to help the company increase visibility of their brand, and increase the leads they received from passive candidates.
- Start marketing their jobs on social media. This is something the company did not do currently. They do have a marketing department, have a Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages. Marketing was specifically used by their sales team. They had a small following of around 3,500 over these networks. They did not have a LinkedIn page, so the first step was to get the marketing team involved and set it up. Then, invite all employees to follow that page. Post regularly, at least weekly, whether about their latest product offerings, company news, and of course, job openings. The important part is building up the content on this page, and keeping it updated. Another step was to ask their employees to share any job opening posts with the people they were connected to.
- Update their career page. Refresh the page with some new content, including updating their benefits, images of the company “at work.” Adding the “follow us on LinkedIn” badge to this page as well.
- Providing an Alternative to Apply Now. When it comes to passive candidates, they may be somewhat interested, but not necessarily ready to jump. Or you might not have a suitable role at that moment. The alternative call to action provides a way for the passive candidate to stay in touch, stay aware of you, and be informed when you do have the right openings. You can do this through an email or text alert, newsletter or social media.
- Going Old School. The company is located in a high-traffic area, both foot and vehicular traffic. We recommended adding a “Now Hiring” sign that displayed their website address on their grounds that passersby would be able to see.
- Using the contacts they have! This company was very lucky int hat they had 70,000 contacts, the contact information from people who had applied in the last six years. We recommended doing blasts to these older candidates to determine interest and raise awareness of their open roles.
A combination of the above, plus continuing to post your active roles on your ATS can help you attract both passive and active candidates to your company. iRecruit helps by providing a way to manage your job posts and applicants in one centralized database. Post your jobs – free – or sponsor to ZipRecruiter, Indeed and Monster as well as your own custom career page.
For more information on attracting passive candidates, orgetting started with recruitment marketing, please see the Recruitment Marketing Strategies You Can Use Today Recorded Webinar.
About iRecruit
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