Tips for Finding Passive Candidates

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Is this happening in your company? Your recruiting process isn’t producing as many successful hires as you’d like, or it’s costing you more and more for fewer and fewer quality hires. Wonder why? Are you focusing on passive candidates?

Internationally known HR thought-leader, speaker, and author Dr. John Sullivan discusses the candidate-driven job market and its impact on recruiting when advising employers and recruiters on effective recruiting strategy. While many employers are still going after active candidates, Sullivan says the only way to be successful when the power has shifted to the candidate is to change your recruiting strategies, one of which is shifting your recruiting focus from active to passive candidates.


Why Focus on Passive Talent?
Not totally convinced? Look no further than CareerBuilder’s 2015 Candidate Behavior Study, which shows candidates today are more selective in the job search, use the same level of due diligence as when house or car shopping, and use jamaica phone number library an average of 18 different sources when looking for a job and a new employer. Does your recruiting strategy put your company and its open positions in at least 18 different recruiting and candidate engagement venues?

CareerBuilder’s survey found that 75 percent of passive candidates are open to or actively looking for new job opportunities. That is a lot of untapped talent interested in new opportunities, and if you’re not actively looking for and engaging them, you’re missing out on a huge population of talent with the current skills, knowledge, and experience that your company needs. If a focus on passive talent isn’t part of your recruiting strategy today, here’s how to add it now.


Add Passive Candidate Sourcing
Looking through your ATS and incoming resumes may show you who is actively looking for a job at your company, but it doesn’t show you candidates who are employed but may be open to an opportunity with your firm. For that, you have to actively source passive candidates. That means looking at who is active in industry forums, blogs, and social media. Look at social media profiles of those who match keywords from your job postings through Boolean search, or better yet use one of the new social aggregation tools like SwoopTalent, TalentBin, Gild, or HiringSolved. From LinkedIn profiles, find out what LinkedIn groups top candidates are in and look at posts and comments, and post your openings to the groups where promising candidates participate. Look at industry and association forums to see who is active and contributing there and connect, including where you can find just about any group that will contain your target candidates. You don’t necessarily have to physically go to meetups, as you can hang out with members online, and you can even message them. For IT candidates, specifically programmers, go to StackOverflow and GitHub, two of most popular social sites for software developers.