Your employees make your company work, but you need the best talent for your organization to head in the right direction. Staffing and recruiting are constant struggles in any business, and open job listings may yield hours of interviews with no actual results. When looking for the ideal applicant, you don’t need to rely on the active job seeker to come to you. Your organization needs to attract passive applicants to fill the most critical positions without risky leaps of faith and wasted time.
What Are Passive Candidates?
A passive job candidate is someone who isn’t actively seeking a job but could be the perfect fit for your needs. While these potential hires may not actively look for new employment, they’re often open to new opportunities. These kinds of candidates can often be a better match for specific job openings for a few different reasons:
- Fast Onboarding: If you get someone from a similar position to the one you have open, they may fit nicely into the role and already have the skills they need. These lateral moves also often involve less risk on your part if the candidate has a proven track record in their current role.
- Simple Negotiation: Since they’re not actively seeking a job, they’re likely only considering your position and will take it if your offer is competitive. You won’t have to worry much about getting outbid by a competitor or having a bad candidate accept a job out of desperation since they are already employed.
- Efficiency: Interviewing active candidates can often feel more like fishing than a business negotiation. However, with passive candidates, you know that they’re interested in a serious opportunity, otherwise they wouldn’t be talking to you. These are usually more skilled professionals seeking to grow their career. Hence, you’re more likely to get a quality candidate without investing as much time.
Recruiting Passive Candidates for Your Position
It’s difficult to learn how to get candidates for recruitment, but there are always hard-working professionals out there who would love the opportunity you have available. If they’re not looking for a job, though, how do you attract passive candidates to your position? Passive recruiting methods can seem counterintuitive, but there are some basic ways to ensure that you can tap into the pool of passive candidates that might be a perfect fit for your position.
Get Them to Come to You
By cultivating a positive brand image over time, your company can begin to see passive candidates just expressing interest out of nowhere. When people are aware that your employees are treated well and are given opportunities to grow, excellent candidates will be talking about it. This path to recruiting passive candidates is a long road, but being known as the best place to work will always keep you with a flow of top-tier applicants.
Get out and Go to Them
One simple way to get more exposure to passive candidates is to engage the people who are the best fit for your company’s needs. Become part of the professional community and develop relationships. When those people think about opportunities, you want them to call you. You can also connect with professionals in your industry on LinkedIn or other social media communities and start positioning yourself well to tap into available talent. This method may take more short-term, direct effort, but you could potentially see results quickly.
Full-service solutions like Sprockets’ virtual recruiter is often an efficient way to make sure that somebody is always out there on your behalf doing what they can to not let great applicants slip through the cracks. Not every professional with the skills you need is a potential passive candidate, but you certainly want to capture those that are.
Attract Candidates Who Are the Ideal Fit
Invest your time and resources in the right talent. Finding a candidate who meshes well with your team and is a precise match for your company culture can be invaluable, and you shouldn’t have to settle for anyone less than ideal.
Here at Sprockets, we use AI-powered software to reveal which applicants will succeed like your top performers. Our virtual recruiter and sourcing services can further engage potential passive candidates and keep your open positions in front of those who will best fit your organization. Schedule a demo with us today and see how Sprockets can help boost applicant flow.