What Sourcing Strategies Do You Use to Recruit Passive Candidates?

By hrlineup | 16.08.2022

The job market is dominated by plenty of job seekers, most of who are passive candidates. While finding active candidates for open positions is easy, passive candidate recruiting is one of the challenges most recruiters and hiring professionals experience. This challenge is because such candidates already have jobs and are not actively searching. As a recruiter, it is crucial to be familiar with sourcing and recruiting all types of candidates, whether you are permanently employed by a company or work as an independent contractor. So, what sourcing strategies do you use to recruit passive candidates? Here’s a closer look.

Passive Sourcing vs Active Sourcing

Before we dive into top creative sourcing strategies recruitment for passive candidates, let’s first understand how passive sourcing differs from active. Note that passive sourcing is the technique of attracting talent already employed and not actively searching for new opportunities. On the other hand, active sourcing refers to hiring practices based on attracting candidates not employed to fill a particular role.

Recruiters must exert tremendous effort and employ superior tactics to attract passive candidates. You must persuade this talent pool and convince them that working for you will be more advantageous than their current employment. Most of the time, passive candidates are more qualified and experienced than active candidates, making them a treasure for every business.

Recruiting, attracting, and hiring passive applicants are three processes that recruiters and hiring professionals must follow. The reason is to have creative sourcing strategies for recruiting candidates and complete your hiring process successfully. Let’s examine how it’s done below.

1. How to Source Passive Candidates

Identifying and locating passive applicants is part of the sourcing process. To engage and hire passive applicants, recruiters must first identify them. Recruiters can use the sourcing tactics listed below to access this talent pool quickly.

Leverage Social Media

Strategic usage of this candidate sourcing technique is beneficial because most passive applicants have accounts on social networking sites other than LinkedIn. You can use Twitter and Facebook for networking, but you shouldn’t discount LinkedIn because it is the most professional of all the social media platforms. Since their profiles include a complete description of their work, identifying these prospects is simple.

Google

One of the responsibilities of Google Play is identifying passive prospects, which makes it simpler for recruiters to find this category of potential. Recruiters who have used Google’s resume search have found tremendous success in their hiring processes, and looking for passive prospects is even simpler.

Referrals and Networks

Recruiter recruiters can share their job orders and candidates to assist one another in finding people who are qualified for the job role. Additionally, your present staff might have suggestions for ideal candidates for the post. Although passive applicants are known to be reluctant to reply to recruiters directly, your chances of securing them may increase if a familiar person is involved.

Using Sourcing Tools and Techniques

There are many other online sourcing tools and recruitment management systems besides Google and LinkedIn. Leveraging free recruitment webinar videos can offer strategies and techniques for sourcing passive candidates. An example of the such webinar is “Over 20 Ways to Find Star Candidates for FREE”

2. Attracting Passive Candidates

To attract passive candidates, you need to do something that will capture their attention. What is your company putting on the table that is better than their current employers? This process requires more effort and creative strategy compared to when attracting active candidates.

Most recruiters use cold calling recruitment techniques; with this, you need to know how to engage passive candidates. However, you can attract this talent through your company’s website by getting them to apply for the job role online. You may be surprised that some passive candidates follow you through your social media website.

Establishing solid, enduring relationships with outstanding applicants is another strategy to attract passive candidates. They’ll become a terrific talent pipeline if you keep in touch with them and gain insight into their aspirations and ambitions for the future. Furthermore, since you already know what they want, having this information will make it easier for you to persuade them to work for you.

3. How to Recruit Passive Talent

Your business must be better than their current workplace and more advantageous to their professional advancement for you to recruit passive talent. How can you persuade this talent pool that your company is the greatest?

Create a Captivating Opportunity

How better is the opportunity offered compared to the candidates’ current work? You should ensure to provide better compensation and work environment. Passive candidates are not looking for more money; they need an employer who will propel their career development and enhance their skills and work experience. If your company can offer this opportunity, hire passive talent.

Showcase Your Organization’s Culture

You must outperform rival businesses, particularly those with which they already have business relationships, to attract passive prospects. This group of talented individuals seeks employment with the most outstanding companies with high objectives and make a difference in the sector. Before hiring someone in this situation, you must grasp their values.

Additionally, you need to highlight the business culture so that potential employees may decide if it aligns with their values or not. Hiring a top applicant who won’t feel at home in your business and will leave early would be the wrong decision. The entire process will be a waste of time and resources, as we are all aware.

Tie their Vision to the Opportunity

The majority of passive applicants are just concerned with advancing their professions. You must help identify potential candidates’ future ambitions into the opportunity you wish to present to them to acquire passive candidates successfully. You must demonstrate how the change will enable them to realize their objectives and advance personally and professionally.

Conclusion 

Sourcing for a passive candidate is challenging, although not impossible, if creative sourcing strategy recruitment is applied. In all the steps and techniques mentioned above, you must ensure to fully engage these candidates like you do when sourcing for active candidates.

To win this group of talent easily, ensure to create a strong relationship with them, know what they want, and reach out to them immediately you have an opportunity that you consider fit for their expertise. Therefore, use our passive candidate sourcing strategies for recruiters and get the top talent you need for better productivity.