Finding the right candidate is seemingly more complex than finding a needle in a haystack. And that’s saying a lot. At the end of the day, you want to build a stronger, more capable team that can make short-term progress for long-term gains. Easier said than done.
A plain job posting and waiting for resumes to roll in probably won’t get you very far. Even a bulletproof job description can fall flat without a hard look at how candidates will evaluate you and your company.
That’s why refining your recruitment strategies is mission-critical. Whether you’re a growing startup, an established enterprise, or somewhere in between, attracting top-tier talent requires proactivity, sure, and thoughtfulness. This blog explores proven strategies to help you connect with—and win over—the candidates who can make a real impact.
Why Attracting Better Candidates Matters: By the Numbers
With the tech talent shortage continuing to rage on, it’s no surprise that the competition for great talent has never been fiercer.
- Beyond compensation, active job seekers are primarily motivated by career advancement (52%) and greater work flexibility or remote work opportunities (49%), per JobVite.
- Failing to offer either of these key decision drivers means a deficit in your hiring capabilities right off the bat.
- The biggest recruiting challenges companies face include competition from other employers (up from 30% in 2023 to 37% in 2024) and not enough people to fill open positions (up from 31% in 2023 to 33% in 2024)
- Building a strong employer brand plays a critical role here in differentiating your company from others and finding the right people to fill your open positions.
- Referral, agency, and sourced candidates represent 30% of candidates that are likely to move from interview to offer, according to Ashby HQ.
As we see the need for great talent increasing beyond the supply, the existing talent pools are no longer sufficient. The solution to the changing trends in recruitment is to shift focus to passive candidate strategies.
Attracting high-talent can lead to an increase in company revenue, which is why today’s senior leaders are starting to invest in more evolved recruitment strategies. It is these strategies that aid you in implementing new systems and tools, and in building relationships with outside resources that can help you create a recruitment strategy that works.
What is an Active Candidate?
Active candidates, sometimes referred to as ‘on-the-market’ talent, are candidates who are actively looking for employment. Historically, corporate recruitment strategies have been primarily aimed at ‘active or in-market’ talent.
Benefits of Active Candidates
86% of employed individuals are at least somewhat open to other job opportunities. These candidates may simply be looking for their next big career move, which may be at your company.
Presently employed or not, active candidates take the time to research and apply to a company, and are more likely to apply to, and accept an offer from, employers who don’t have strong employment brands. They are also less likely to negotiate hard for salaries or perks outside the local market norms.
Other Factors of Active Candidates
There are some deeply held opinions that candidates who are out of work are ‘lesser’ and that only ‘bad’ employees find themselves actively looking for a new job due to a termination or layoff.
Our experience is that each situation is very unique.
Bad managers exist within all industries and can often create extreme working conditions that drive otherwise good employees away. According to a 2023 Harris Poll survey on toxic boss experiences, 66 percent of employees with toxic bosses plan to quit as soon as it’s economically feasible.
This just goes to show how common it is for a top-performing employee to actively decide to leave a company that isn’t meeting their career needs. One employer’s bad hire can be another employer’s best hire.
What is a Passive Candidate?
Passive candidates, sometimes referred to as ‘in-market’ talent, are candidates who are already employed in their field.
For many hiring managers, passive talent has always been preferable, but costly to find. Passive candidates already have a proven track record in their space, have established value as a competitor, and the value that they can bring to your team. Most importantly, passive job seekers make up 70% of all candidates.
Benefits of Passive Candidates
Hiring passive candidates often removes pressure from the hiring manager, as these candidates are lower-risk hires that are pre-vetted simply by being employed in a similar role. As a result, these candidates don’t have any motivation to embellish their experience, and will never accept a role out of desperation.
Adapting To Recent Recruiting Market Trends
The major market trends indicate a focus on passive talent strategies. Passive talent requires a proactive plan, including a more personalized approach in how you market roles and engage with the talent community. For many organizations, this could mean taking a big step away from past recruitment strategies.
75% of hiring managers agree that passive candidates pose more of a challenge for them. Yet, over 70%of all job seekers are passive. That means most recruitment teams can’t properly engage with the largest existing candidate pool.
If recruiters don’t start to adapt their ability to recruit passive candidates successfully, their teams will suffer. But what does adapting even mean, and how do you start?
Below, TalentLab has some professional tips to help jumpstart your team into the new generation of recruitment.
Effective Recruitment Strategies to Attract Passive Job Seekers
1. Build Your Culture
When attracting passive talent, your corporate culture and employment brand will be huge factors in your success. Did you know that 75% of passive candidates have said they would refuse a role with a company that has a ‘bad reputation’? So, building a solid culture throughout your organization should be a top priority.
Unfortunately, culture is something that’s hard to control because it’s most authentic when developed over time. This can be an issue for recruitment teams seeking to establish a culture quickly.
As a first step, define the culture you are trying to build. Culture is how you demonstrate or live your corporate values. Without values, there can be no culture.
Involve All Employees
It’s common to think that value development should remain in the hands of senior management. However, employees from all levels of the company should be included in the discussion. Culture can’t be forced from the top down. So, including everyone in value development will be more impactful, and your employees will be more likely to adopt your new company culture.
If you are part of a larger organization, we recommend asking for one or two representatives from each team to participate in the culture discussions. This will allow the various teams to provide their opinions and feel heard.
Create a Safe Space for Discussion
Once you have identified all your stakeholders for the creation of your values, it’s essential to establish a safe space for these discussions. Employees need to feel empowered to speak frankly and honestly about their experiences. By doing this, you will get to the root of what is important to them and ensure that the decided values are in line with what they want in their work environment.
Culture Builders
At this point, you have nailed down what your values and cultural goals are. Now you should start nurturing a few current employees so they become your in-house culture builders.
Consider supporting current employees to:
- Speak at conferences
- Host development meetups in your offices
- Send teams to exciting community events.
These are great ways to nurture your current team into culture builders. The secret sauce here is to empower your employees to be the drivers by trusting them to be ambassadors in a way that makes them comfortable. This involves:
- Culture builders having some real choice in the events they attend
- Working to incorporate their areas of interest
- Culture builders having the freedom to speak frankly (so don’t make their slide decks for them!)
- Ensuring participation is always voluntary.
- Culture builders can equally become a destructive force if pushed into situations that they are not comfortable with.
Should You Hire New Employees to be Culture Builders?
Maybe. It’s about quantifying the traits you are looking for. Select new hires who naturally demonstrate your values.
- Collaboration: If collaboration is a vital cultural point, you might want to look for candidates who have participated in hackathons or other group coding activities that demonstrate an interest in working as part of a team.
- Independent Work: If your culture emphasizes independent work, consider candidates who have developed their own app or actively contributed to open-source projects, such as GitHub, providing assistance to other users with less direct supervision.
The key is to find people who will be at their very best in your natural culture, and who will appeal to other like-minded individuals.
2. Build a Talent Community
Talent communities are crucial to your overall recruitment strategy. It is a system that employers use to build their pipeline of prospective candidates for future recruitment. It’s essentially a sales pipeline, but for candidates. You wouldn’t let your sales pipeline go dry or ignored, would you?
With a talent community comes the need for organized documentation. Everything from tactical benefits of building a proactive candidate pipeline to strategic brand promotion. Supporting the community around your organization will be vital to your success with passive candidates. Yet, we often see internal recruitment teams struggle to master the art of the community.
It’s actually very easy to get it right, and it’s really just one mantra: Don’t wait until you need a talent community to care about it. The real secret to success is that your investment must be authentic and without obvious self-interest.
How to Build a Talent Community
- If you know you will be hiring in the fall, use the slow summer to proactively host a few events.
- If you fill a position and have several very strong candidates left over, ensure that your team maintains a running list that will be useful to you as the organization grows.
- Stay in touch with those candidates through an email list to give them regular hiring updates.
- You can even have candidates sign up to be a part of your community using most Application Tracking Systems (ATS) on the market.
- If you traditionally hire out of a certain program, nurture those relationships through the year, not just at graduation time when you need them.
Championing the Community
The focus here should be to become known as a champion of the community itself, not just for self-interested reasons a few times a year. A real-world example of this was Shopify’s “Build Things, Show Ottawa“ event in 2018. They invited students to create an app over several weeks and then showcase it to the local tech community.
Similar events are hosted daily by companies worldwide, but in this case, Shopify invited several local companies, angel investors, and even select headhunters to the final presentations, making participation even more valuable for the students.
Not only did they have a chance to impress the Shopify team, but several companies in the same local market as well. The key is that the event didn’t just help Shopify but the community as a whole.
Eventually, events like this become ‘must-dos’ for top young talent, therefore bringing in higher quality talent year after year. It’s about making the candidates feel valued and investing back into a community that you will likely rely on to fill staff positions for the foreseeable future.
How to Choose Community Events
When choosing what events to participate in or support, consider choosing smaller niche events that are not related to HR, and ditch the outdated ‘career fair’ mentality. You’re in passive country now. Instead of setting up a booth, allow your team the freedom to casually wander through the event, making personal connections. Instead of asking for resumes or discussing open roles, focus on learning more about the community and the trends that are affecting it.
Hackathons, game jams, conferences, and university competitions are all great options, but remember to follow up after the event to build deeper connections with the community.
3. Create an Employee Referral Program
Some of the best and quickest hires come from referrals. In fact, research has shown that 46% of referral hires remain for over 1 year, 45% for over 2 years, and 47% for over 3 years. Professionals are not comfortable suggesting someone for a role unless they believe they will add value. Your internal team also understands your culture and the scope of work, so if they are suggesting someone, it’s generally worth taking a look at the candidate.
Most organizations have some version of a referral program, but they tend to be ad hoc and not well organized. Often, there is a lack of transparency in the process, so employees can be hesitant to refer someone or become discouraged by the program and ultimately leave the company.
Ensuring your employee referrals are done effectively is a huge cost savings compared to many of the recruitment tools or even vendor fees you might incur to solve protracted hiring issues.
Referral Sofware
If you don’t currently have a referral process in place, then it can be intimidating to navigate through the options. The easiest path is to consider purchasing software to manage it for you.
Various products on the market have big selling features for overloaded recruitment teams, including intuitive interfaces for your employees to easily refer anyone, even without a resume. With these, current employees can track the interview progress of a referral, and your HR department can easily track the performance of referrals for reward or bonus purposes.
Leverage Employee Social Media
Another key feature for targeting passive candidates is the ability for anyone in your organization to share job descriptions on their socials. Consider that employees have ten times more followers than corporate social media accounts.Providing incentives or bonuses for employees who voluntarily advertise open roles on social media can be an effective way to generate word of mouth to a larger audience, saving both time and money while not sacrificing the quality of your hires.
Avoid Common Referral Mistakes
It’s equally important to consider common mistakes recruitment teams make when creating a referral program. Looping in current employees into the recruitment process can be dangerous, especially if you are known to ghost candidates. Often, employees don’t understand why their referral was not hired, and can be frustrated if they feel you have passed over a personal friend or family member unfairly.
Before rolling out a referral program, ensure that your employees understand the non-negotiables for new hires and the onboarding procedures.
Yes, all current employees have been through your hiring process and should therefore be aware of standards, but depending on the length of time that has passed since then, they might not be as familiar as you would expect. It could be an embarrassing situation for all parties involved if a referral doesn’t meet the basic criteria.
You should consider conducting bias and selection training, as employees often refer similar candidates, which can lead to a loss of diversity within your organization. Consider implementing rules to prevent employees from referring candidates for roles that are too closely related to their own within the organization, thereby avoiding favouritism.
You also need to put safeguards in place to avoid overloading your talent acquisition team with irrelevant referrals. Ensure that if or when you ask for referrals, you set clear guidelines for what skills you need. Limiting the number of referrals that employees can make per year or to each job will also motivate your employees to only refer the best, and again reduce the number of random referrals that will clog the system.
Monetary Incentives
If you choose to offer a monetary incentive to employees, be very clear about what they need to do to receive the incentive. Most companies only reward employees once their referral has successfully finished the probationary period. This is a great way to motivate employees to suggest people they believe will be a long-term fit with the organization, but you should ensure that employees are aware of the waiting period.
It’s also a good rule to ensure that you coordinate with your accounting and finance team so that there’s a clear understanding between the two teams of how the process will work.
4. Create a Great Candidate Experience
At times when the market is flat, poor candidate engagement habits and underdeveloped talent strategies won’t necessarily impede recruitment. Candidates who are on the market and looking for work are willing to compromise more often than not. When the market is tight and talent is sparse, having a strong candidate experience will make or break your ability to recruit top talent.
It’s not just about promoting the brand and targeting the right talent; it’s about treating that talent right through the process and beyond. 95% of candidates said they would reapply after not receiving an offer if their experience was positive, whereas 22% said they would tell others not to apply if their experience was negative.
As an organization, you’ll need to develop some rules of engagement to help you stay competitive in a tight market.
The Passive Candidate Experience
Passive candidates work for great companies already, so for them, making a move is a risk, and they will be vetting your organization just as thoroughly as you plan to vet them. Work with your hiring managers to develop a value proposition that answers the question:
“Why would the candidate we want to hire also want to accept that position?”
If you are struggling to find an answer, consider reevaluating the profile and tailoring it towards someone more junior or from a different industry. A rising star with a lot of potential will see more value in a ‘not so glitzy’ role than a candidate making a lateral move. Getting a hiring manager to understand that passive candidates expect a two-way conversation can be the biggest challenge.
- Make the process easy and as quick as possible. This is an absolute must in a tight market.
- Avoid asking passive candidates to complete assessments or tests before they meet with the hiring manager.
- Again, these people are already employed and doing similar work. Suggesting they should invest hours without even discussing the role sends the wrong message.
- Review each step of your interview process to make sure it’s as tight as it can be.
- If there are any steps that you feel are not absolutely necessary to make a confident hire, then cut them.
Offer Discussions
A great candidate experience isn’t just about the interviews, but also how you choose to end the process, especially if your team decides to make an offer. Many companies still operate on outdated salary information and mindsets. Salary discussions should never be based on the hiring manager’s personal opinions; instead, the recruitment team must provide real-time market data to help inform salary discussions. By removing these outdated salary processes, you can streamline your offer stage and, in turn, continue to deliver a quick and positive candidate experience.
Timelines and Milestones
To create a solid candidate experience, hold all stakeholders accountable to the timeline and milestones originally agreed upon. Even the executive hiring managers. Before starting a search, ensure that everyone involved has a clear understanding of their responsibilities and the expectations. It’s easy for senior leaders to blame the recruitment team for a lack of success, but in reality, recruiters are the GPS, and the hiring managers are the drivers. We don’t go anywhere unless the hiring manager decides to hit the gas.
5. Partner with a Headhunter
Sometimes you have tried everything to get the right passive candidate, and you still haven’t found the one. Or, maybe you’re just not sure if you will be able to sort through all that top talent to find that one that’s best suited for your specific needs.
This is the point at which you will start discussing the option of hiring external help. Depending on the agency, they can be great passive candidate partners for difficult talent searches. However, the industry is not standardized, and not all agencies are created equally. Choosing a partner can be a painstaking process, and sometimes the effort yields little success.
How Do Headhunters Work?
Imagine you are a fisherman, and you need to catch a certain type of fish. Corporate recruitment teams cast a large net into a large body of water, and then spend most of their time sorting through their net to find the specific fish they need.
Headhunters, on the other hand, are rare fish specialists who use spears instead of nets. They spend the bulk of their time researching the waterways, the fish migration patterns, what makes these fish tick and then with a little effort catch the one fish they need. Again, not all headhunters are created equally, and similar to any profession, there are some great and equally bad ones out there.
How to Select the Right Headhunters
Some golden rules will help you better select partners.
- You should understand your needs before engaging with any external recruitment vendors.
- Then vet the agency and make sure their model is well-suited to your needs.
- If you need 50-200 temp workers for an urgent project, then a generalist global agency will be best positioned to help. They will likely have the manpower and processes in place to supply a large amount of temp talent quickly.
- If you need one or two skilled technical workers, you should seek out an agency that specializes in the desired subject matter.
- Build relationships with 3-4 agencies that specialize in different areas and recruitment styles. This is particularly true if you have technical or engineering business units, as any roles that come up in those teams will absolutely require recruiters who have subject matter knowledge in those areas.
- If you are currently working with only larger global agencies, consider reevaluating and introducing a smaller, niche vendor to augment your current vendor list.
As much as a headhunter or an agency can help give you additional candidate options you won’t find elsewhere, they are only as successful as you allow them to be. If you aren’t honest about your needs and limitations, then the chances for success are minimal. You should listen to their advice and allow them to pass along valuable market knowledge and candidate information that will impact your success. You also need to give them clear feedback and updates regularly.
Snag Those Passive Candidates with Top-tier Recruiting Strategies
Attracting top talent isn’t just about knowing where to find them; it’s about having effective systems and processes in place to show them that making an unforeseen, and frankly, surprising, career move is in their best interest.
It’s a combination of establishing your talent funnel, nurturing those relationships, just like you would with a sales funnel, long-term, ensuring you have a strong candidate experience in place, and following through with that positive experience after their hire.
Treating these passive candidates like you would a prospective customer is what is going to set you apart from the other companies (your competition) who are simply tossing out wide nets and hoping to catch top talent. Remaining strategic and focused with your talent acquisition efforts is what is going to get you the talent your company needs to grow, scale, and outmaneuver your competition. Connect with us today to learn more.