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Smart Recruiting Strategy Drives Relationships And Conversation

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Passive recruiting is kind of like the darker, more mysterious sibling of active recruiting. Because it is so different from traditional recruiting and usually involves targeting people who don’t have a strong desire to be recruited, many HR professionals and leaders are confused about passive recruiting and how it can help them fill job positions. Making passive recruiting work for your organization is very possible, but to do so you need to understand why it works and how it is done most effectively. Using social media channels and forums to start conversations can be an effective method. Passive recruiting can be as simple as getting to know someone new on Twitter or discovering someone’s blog content and commenting. Relationships, conversation (and eventually metrics of course) are always the goal of this style of recruiting.

Why Passive Recruiting Matters

Surveys have shown that over 93% of the top performers in their field do not find their job from a job posting; instead, they are referred by someone they know, such as a friend or networking contact. HR Consultant Jennifer Millman says that passive talent is more likely to want to make an impact in their workplace and less likely to need skill development, meaning they have both the desire and ability to get up and running quickly.

Knowing the benefits of passive talent is great, but to realize these benefits, companies still must overcome the challenge of making passive recruiting part of your regular strategy. How is this done? By examining a few key metrics of passive recruiting, and then understanding how to incorporate these metrics into your recruiting and branding process.

How To Make Passive Recruiting Work

Passive recruiting may not offer an opportunity to flex your company’s muscles of persuasion as frequently as active recruiting, but there is still a process that can be tailored to fit the needs of your company. Hiring expert Lou Adler says that the two key elements of coming up with a passive recruiting strategy are finding out how the best candidates get their positions and then finding out how the best recruiters find and hire those candidates.

You already know that a big majority of quality performers find their positions from referrals. Think about your industry and the specific kind of candidate you are looking to hire. Ask yourself which passive channels these candidates might be using to secure new employment; are they more likely to keep their inquiries to friends and family members, or will they be trying to market themselves to all their professional contacts?

The second part of Adler’s equation for passive recruiting success involves recruiters. Whether you are using in-house recruiters or outsourcing this work, it is important that you have the help of recruiters with the right abilities. Your recruiters should know how to use their network to find passive candidates, but they should also know how to present your job opening to them. Dealing with passive candidates requires a specific kind of approach that is not overly aggressive yet still sufficiently conveys the benefits of the position.

The Final Word On Passive Recruiting

People who aren’t looking for a job at your company are often some of the most qualified candidates. Passive recruiting to target these prospects can sometimes be scary, since it involves unknown factors and usually requires a more refined approach to recruiting. By breaking down the methods by which passive candidates are hired and the places they are found, your company can succeed in making passive recruiting work to fill your roles with high performers. Recruiting is still about building trust and strong relationships. Start with conversation and the rest may just follow.

A version of this was first posted on Forbes.

#TChat Recap: How Social Recruiting Makes the Talent Business Case

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Do you ever wonder how prevalent social recruiting is today – especially versus five years ago? Or what are considered best practices for reaching out to candidates on social sites? Social recruiting is no longer a trend. It’s the new norm. According to new Dice research, 9 out of 10 recruiters are using social media in talent acquisition.

This week, the TalentCulture community enjoyed a fast-paced and high-energy discussion about how social recruiting makes the talent business case with this week’s guests: Stacy Zapar, Founder of Tenfold, and recruiting strategist, trainer & advisor; and Allison Kruse, Senior Manager of Social Media and Talent Acquisition at Kforce.

Social media has become the tool for promoting jobs, building brands, sourcing candidates, creating relationships, and vetting applicants. Dice research also shows that social has improved or is greatly improving tech recruiting results including quality of candidates, referrals, and time-to-hire.

Think social media is big now? It’s only getting bigger, along with its importance to tech recruiters looking for results. However, there is some art and science to doing it right. Listen to the recording and review the #TChat highlights to learn more.

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#TChat returns Wednesday, Dec 9, 2015 @ 1 pm ET/10 am PT. The TalentCulture team will be talking about our favorite #TChat shows from 2015. Join us and share your favorite #TChat moments from this year.

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Passive Recruiting Encourages Relationships And Conversation

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Passive recruiting is like the more mysterious sibling of active recruiting. Different from traditional recruiting, passive recruiting involves targeting people who don’t have a strong desire to be recruited. HR professionals and leaders are often unaware how it can be used to help them fill job positions. Passive recruiting can work for your organization, but you need to understand the reason why it works and how it is done most effectively. An effective method is using social media channels and forums to start conversations. It can be as easy as getting to know someone new on Twitter or discovering someone’s blog and commenting on the content. The goals of passive recruiting is building relationships, conversation, and eventually metrics.

Why Passive Recruiting Matters

Surveys have shown that over 93% of the top performers in their field do not find their job from a job posting; instead, they are referred by someone they know, such as a friend or networking contact. HR Consultant Jennifer Millman says that passive talent is more likely to want to make an impact in their workplace and less likely to need skill development, meaning they have both the desire and ability to get up and running quickly.

Knowing the benefits of passive talent is great, but to realize these benefits, companies still must overcome the challenge of making passive recruiting part of your regular strategy. How is this done? By examining a few key metrics of passive recruiting, and then understanding how to incorporate these metrics into your recruiting and branding process.
How To Make Passive Recruiting Work

Passive recruiting may not offer an opportunity to flex your company’s muscles of persuasion as frequently as active recruiting, but there is still a process that can be tailored to fit the needs of your company. Hiring expert Lou Adler says that the two key elements of coming up with a passive recruiting strategy are finding out how the best candidates get their positions and then finding out how the best recruiters find and hire those candidates.
You already know that a big majority of quality performers find their positions from referrals. Think about your industry and the specific kind of candidate you are looking to hire. Ask yourself which passive channels these candidates might be using to secure new employment; are they more likely to keep their inquiries to friends and family members, or will they be trying to market themselves to all their professional contacts?

The second part of Adler’s equation for passive recruiting success involves recruiters. Whether you are using in-house recruiters or outsourcing this work, it is important that you have the help of recruiters with the right abilities. Your recruiters should know how to use their network to find passive candidates, but they should also know how to present your job opening to them. Dealing with passive candidates requires a specific kind of approach that is not overly aggressive yet still sufficiently conveys the benefits of the position.

The Final Word On Passive Recruiting

People who aren’t looking for a job at your company are often some of the most qualified candidates. Passive recruiting to target these prospects can sometimes be scary, since it involves unknown factors and usually requires a more refined approach to recruiting. By breaking down the methods by which passive candidates are hired and the places they are found, your company can succeed in making passive recruiting work to fill your roles with high performers. Recruiting is still about building trust and strong relationships. Start with conversation and the rest may just follow.

Originally published on Forbes.com

Passive To Active In Less Than 90 Seconds

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Yes, you do it, too. Don’t deny it.

When you’re gainfully employed, happily or not so, and you actually make the time to update your LinkedIn profile, for whatever reason, you uncheck the box in your account settings that reads:

Let people know when you change your profile, make recommendations, or follow companies.

LinkedIn even adds a footnote for you that calls out why you would uncheck the box:

Note: You may want to turn this option off if you’re looking for a job and don’t want your present employer to see that you’re updating your profile.

There you go. Sure there are valid reasons as to why you’re updating your profile that don’t relate to job seeking. Maybe you received a new certification, or you want to list a recent volunteer stint.

And the converse value of wanting to be found online, having a peer-vetted public profile, is the fact that is it public and you can be found when you don’t really want to be. Again and again I’ve heard from sought-after professionals who get hit on more often via LinkedIn than at a hip new nightclub.

“Hey, do you come here often?”

So they don’t update their profile. Or they mask it with false information. Or then pull it down completely.

But mercy me if you’re socially savvy and know how leverage the Wild West Interwebs and have pivotal skills companies need and don’t call yourself a thought leader while others do, you’ve got to pull down a lot more than the LinkedIn profile if you don’t want to be riddled with spray-and-pray pitch pellets from virtual sawed-off shotguns.

And if you haven’t done it already, social profiling sites like Entelo and TalentBin have most likely already aggregated all your online exhaust and profiled you for the big game hunters. We make ourselves big ol’ targets with our data – created by us and distributed by us – some clean, vetted and valid, and much of it not so much.

Plus, according to 2013 Candidate Experience Award data, “active” candidates are clearly using a few sites quite extensively in their job search activities, which means we’re quite visible on them including (of course) LinkedIn (55%), Glassdoor (21%), Google+ (17%) and Facebook (14%) – all of which were probably underreported and will surely to spike higher in the 2014 CandE data.

But the operative word above is “active,” and during a recent conversation with a PeopleFluent colleague, a long-time recruiting and ATS veteran who works everyday with large global talent acquisition teams, he scoffed at the proverbial “passive” candidate myth.

“Passive, schmassive.”

Okay, he didn’t actually say that, I did, but you get the idea. That’s when we talked shop around the public profile conundrum outlined above, especially for those who don’t want to be found.

Invisible is not the same thing as passive. People are either looking for jobs or they’re not; they either want to be found, or not.

And that’s when the visceral snap of a simple epiphany hit me right between the eyes. Bryan Chaney, sourcing executive at IBM, told us on the TalentCulture #TChat Show “the difference between a passive and active candidate can be less than 90 seconds.”

Damn straight. Less than 90 seconds, which is why we need:

  • Relevant Content. Happy or unhappy, opportunity in the form of smarter and engaging content and storytelling, personable and professional, can remove even the most elusive engineer’s invisibility cloak. In fact, after Bryan conducted a 90-day case study on social media content, conversation-based content increased response rates by 54%. Stories rock and that’s immersive marketing 101 these days anyway.
  • Makes for Relevant Conversations. Savvy marketers can and should educate recruiters and sourcers how to engage prospects in real conversations. Whether it’s on a forum, user group, blog, simple email or any social network, or the old-fashioned phone call or at a live event, the relevant conversation should always be the goal.

Not easy to do when you’re a global company dealing with hundreds of applicants per open req and hundreds of thousands per year, but the recruiters who hit their marks always know their market and the talent they’re targeting. Recruiting (and marketing) are only human and all about relationships and the tipping points of interest can come in a [enter city here] minute.

Passive schmassive indeed. Wait, you can’t really see me, can you?

#TChat Recap: Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content

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Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content

The world of recruiting has embraced many new shapes and forms over the years. Now, it’s dedicated by whatever the industry throws at it, which is not entirely a bad thing. Recruiting is more creative and innovative than it has ever been. We’ve learned that social recruiting is not a trend, it’s a recruiting strategy. We’ve also learned that passive candidates require passive recruiting. If you’re a new entrant to the workforce then you may not have come across it yet, but if you’ve been around long enough then you know it’s when recruiters offer you a brief glimpse of a what a new career elsewhere looks like. The trick is providing passive candidates with the kind of content and dialogue that sticks out to them, but also takes the conversation to the next step. Using conservation-based content to jump start the conversation with passive candidates works. According to #TChat’s guest this week: Bryan Chaney, a Global Talent Sourcing and Attraction Strategist and Sourcing Executive at IBM, conversation-based content increases candidate response rates by 54%.

Bryan knows that engaging passive candidates requires:

Getting passive candidates to pick up your call or seriously consider a job offer is tricky. Recruiters need to be real with candidates, and put the attention on what their needs are versus shouting out job offers because it’s part of their job responsibilities. Recruiters need to focus on:

Ultimately, conversation-based content is about initiating a conversation with real people through a real conversation. The great thing about new recruiting techniques is how they spring to life. Creative thinking and technology is usually the guilty party. Recruiters can initiate conversation-based content by understanding that:

The toughest part about this is figuring out how not to let recruiting efforts go in vain. Measuring success is vital to any strategy, and even more vital to recruiting success. Sure, some candidates show obvious enthusiasm and others show little until they receive their job offer. Either way, recruiters need to understand what’s working and what isn’t for them to find success on a consistent level. Recruiters should consider this:

This week’s #TChat discussion on Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content was a simple reminder that recruiting candidates takes skill, and diligence to understand what certain candidates want, and in this case, what passive candidates want out of their careers. So we need to ask the right questions with passive candidates. Their attention and needs are different. We have to remember, if we want them to hear us back then we have to first listen to them. 

Want To See The #TChat Replay?

 

Closing Notes & What’s Ahead

Thanks again to our guest: Bryan Chaney, a Global Talent Sourcing and Attraction Strategist and Sourcing Executive at IBM. Click here to see the preview and related reading.

#TChat Events: Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content

TChatRadio_logo_020813 #TChat Radio — Are you plugged in to #TChat radio? Did you know you can listen live to ANY of our shows ANY time?

Now you know. Click the box to head on over to our channel or listen to Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content.

Note To Bloggers: Did this week’s events prompt you to write about trends on the engagement experience?

We welcome your thoughts. Post a link on Twitter (include #TChat or @TalentCulture), or insert a comment below, and we may feature it! If you recap #TChat make sure to let us know so we can find you!

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Join us next week, as we talk about The Talent Science of Cultural Change during #TChat Events.

The TalentCulture conversation continues daily on #TChat Twitter, in our LinkedIn group, and on our new Google+ community. So join us anytime on your favorite social channels!

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#TChat Preview: Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content

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The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, July 30, 2014, from 7-8 pm ET (4-5 pm PT). The #TChat radio portion runs the first 30 minutes from 7-7:30 pm ET, followed by the #TChat Twitter chat from 7:30-8 pm ET.

Last week we talked about about workplace bullying, and this week we’re going to talk about passive recruiting strategies.

Converting job seekers into job applicants via relevant career content is easy when they’re looking for a job. But what about those who aren’t?

The elusive passive candidate — that’s where you have to be smarter and engage them in conversations around relevant career content, but not literally job-specific content, at least not all at once.

According to this week’s guest, after a 90-day case study on social media content, conversation-based content increased response rates by 54%.

We should teach recruiters and sourcers how to engage prospects in real conversations. Whether it’s on a forum, user group, blog, simple email or any social network, the conversation should always be the goal.

How do you get the passive ones to start a conversation with you? Strike up a conversation as you would face to face. Talk to them about things they care about first.

Recruiters should always know their market and their talent. Recruiting is only human and all about relationships. Always.

Join #TChat co-creators and hosts Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman as we learn more about passive recruiting with this week’s guest: Bryan Chaney, a Global Talent Sourcing and Attraction Strategist and Sourcing Executive at IBM.

Related Reading:

Lou Adler: Use Benchmarking To Build A Passive Candidate Recruiting Machine

Meghan M. Biro: Smart Recruiting Strategy Drives Relationships and Conversation

Charles Coy: 5 Stellar Strategies For Recruiting Passive Candidates

Lisa Jones: Passive Talent Is The New Black

Glen Cathey: Building Talent Pipelines vs. Lean/ Just In-Time Recruiting

We hope you’ll join the #TChat conversation this week and share your questions, opinions and ideas with our guests and the TalentCulture Community.

#TChat Events: Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content

TChatRadio_logo_020813#TChat Radio — Wed, August 6 — 7 pm ET / 4 pm PT Tune-in to the #TChat Radio show Our hosts, Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman talk with our guest Bryan Chaney.

Tune-in LIVE online this Wednesday!

#TChat Twitter Chat — Wed, August 6 — 7:30 pm ET / 4:30 pm PT Immediately following the radio show, Meghan, Kevin and our guests will move to the #TChat Twitter stream, where we’ll continue the discussion with the entire TalentCulture community. Everyone with a Twitter account is invited to participate, as we gather for a dynamic live chat, focused on these related questions:

Q1: What are the best strategies for engaging passive candidates today? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Q2: How should recruiters and sourcers initiate conversation-based content? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Q3: How can recruiters gauge success based on the conversion of conversations to hires? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Throughout the week, we’ll keep the discussion going on the #TChat Twitter feed, and in our new TalentCulture G+ community. So feel free to drop by anytime and share your questions, ideas and opinions. See you there!!

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