As a hiring manager, you must have heard about the confrontation between active candidates and passive candidates. However, not everyone knows that passive candidates are not always totally passive. In fact, the best employee you are looking to hire might actually be a passive candidate. To get a great hire, one of the most successful tactics is to convert a passive candidate into a potential quality employee you want.
What are passive candidates?
A passive candidate is someone who has a job either looking for a new one or having no current interest in changing jobs. Why should our hiring strategies include passive candidates as well as active ones? An online survey revealed that 75% of candidates are passive, with 15% of them reaching out to personal networks for new job opportunities and 45% of them being open to talking to a recruiter, as well as the rest, 15% of them do not want to move at all. Given the passive candidates occupy 75% of the workforce, this is a group that cannot be ignored and also where you may find your best candidate. Unlike active candidates, passive candidates won’t have a complete and up-to-date resume ready due to not actually applying for a job. However, as they are already in the industry and working, most of them will have relevant working experience and expertise and hence potential to be the best candidate you are looking to hire.
How to hire passive candidates?
As mentioned before, there are a great number of passive candidates and the possibility that these passive candidates are open to a new job is quite high. Also, since they are not seeking a new job, they probably won’t be interviewing with any other employers. So how to convert passive candidates into potential employees for your team? Talk to them to get them excited for your offer. Your best bet might not be general job boards where you are frequently posting jobs because it is clear passive candidates won’t spend time conducting searches at these places. Your proactive sourcing is more likely to be social media or specific communities (tech savvy group etc.) where they engage with friends or people in the same industry. Even if you have found special places where they are hanging around, since they haven’t expressed any interest in your company, they probably won’t answer your offer. Therefore, fully prepare yourself before reaching out to them. Introduce you and your company to them and think of several good reasons to start a conversation, including why you want to talk to them and why your offer can benefit them more than in their current position. Also, it’s better for you to clarify why you think the candidate is a good fit for your position. Don’t forget that it is not going to be a simple task as they are employed and would have a higher requirement on new offers.
Another good way to approach them is utilizing existing employees in your company as referrals. Since your employees are currently working for your company, their opinions on the company sound more trustworthy in the eyes of passive candidates. Have an employee referral program to make your employees potential hiring manager's and encourage them to tell good stories about your company and share interesting parts of the company culture. It is notable that passive candidates are always more likely to be convinced by people in their personal network than a stranger.
How Gapmarks can help?
In your search for passive candidates, you may find it is not an easy task to reach out to all possible websites in the industry. Gapmarks - our newest automated posting system could help you connect with passive candidates. We know that passive candidates are of great importance to your talent pool, so Gapmarks has incorporated not only job boards, but also classified sites, communities and social channels specificall where passive candidates visit. They are sifted to check whether they are of high quality and high traffic, assuring a best result for every posting. The process of posting on Gapmarks is simple. Complete the job form and click “post out”. Immediately your job openings are auto-sent to job boards, classified sites, specific communities and social channels, maximizing your candidate traffic and visibility. It is also worth mentioning that our brand new powerful and unique intelligent posting technology. This technology is able to smartly figure out the best time to post jobs ads since we have a data pool collecting the traffic changes at different times. Therefore, your jobs ads are always visible to active candidates and more importantly, passive candidates. To minimize your time and effort, our software can pull and update job ads from your XML feed every 24 hours without your ever needing to login to the system. Why not include Gapmarks to your recruitment strategies now! With highly affordable packages targeting various businesses, Gapmarks makes sure you’re getting the best talent and the best hiring experience possible.
Check out: 14.0pt; color: #003d4c; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">http://gapmarks.com/lpr for more information
