Highly qualified candidates remain open for a job change only for a few days and hundreds of companies are after them. It makes hiring tough for every human resource executive there. In order to fill the vacancy of the organizations, HRs are bound to knock passive candidates i.e. candidates that are not actively looking for a job change. It is not that passive candidates are not willing to change their current company. They can change their present companies if you can impress them at the very first stage. There is a high possibility of turning a qualified passive candidate into your employee. But the task is not that easy. We can make the task easier than ever for you. To know how to hire passive candidates easily, keep reading this informative blog.
Who are passive candidates and why should you hire them?
When it comes to hiring new talents for your organizations, a lot of hiring experts will suggest you go for passive candidates. A passive candidate is basically a person who is employed and presently not looking for any change. You can say that when passive candidates are not looking for any change, why should we go after them! The passive candidate group accounts for 85% of the workforce. The beneficial secret is that when they are not looking for a job change, they are probably not interviewing with anyone else. And a majority of passive candidates are open to discuss a new job opportunity with a recruiter.
When a major group of passive candidates is open to discuss a new opportunity, you should identify some proactive sourcing options to connect with them. We can say that social networking sites can be a great way to find and connect with these candidates. On the other hand, it is really hard to understand if the passive candidate is really interested in discussing a new opportunity.
We know that you are having a question right now and that is how a passive candidate can be a better hire for an organization! Passive candidates are good at their work and they are valuable assets of their companies. It is true that the lack of urgency to join a new job indicates less chance of interviewing with other recruiters. And you can understand that a passive candidate comes with less hiring competition. Passive candidates are somehow satisfied with their current companies. And winning a satisfied candidate is tougher! But that does not define you cannot win them and turn them into your employees.
Now you are thinking about how to hire passive candidates. Well, the process is pretty simple but you have to accelerate your journey systematically. We are here to make the journey easier than you could have imagined.
How to find passive candidates, engage them, and hire them?
- Finding passive candidates
The process is easy and simple. You can start by using robust social networking like LinkedIn. You can have an account of your organization and start posting new job posts. You can have your personal account and do the same. In the job post, you must include who you are actually looking for, skills, experience, expertise, and a standard hint of the project/task.
After that, you should build rapport first, gain the trust of your passive candidates, and express your interest in discussing new job opportunities with them. You have to impressively convey how this job position is going to benefit them.
It is true that reaching these passive candidates will be easy if we take the help of various social media platforms. You can use leading platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, etc to express who you are and whom you are looking for via a short and to-the-point post. Interested candidates can knock you directly and you will get quality referrals from your follower base.
- Engage passive candidates
Get their attention
You have to engage passive candidates in order to get the maximum benefit. Only finding the sources to reach the passive candidates is not enough to have new talents in your workforce. You have to retain and engage passive candidates.
In order to engage passive candidates, you have to start with getting their attention. The process of attracting should be short and crisp. You have to think from their perspective and understand what can melt the ice.
Listen to the requirements of them
You have to care about your sales pitch as passive candidates are not looking for any job change. In order to make them agree to come for an interview and to join your company, you can build rapport. You have to listen to their requirements carefully. When you will carefully listen to their requirements and career plans, it will create an environment of trust. Trust powers more when it comes to how to hire passive candidates easily.
Once you are done with individual research, you can generate some charming points to use while having a discussion as an ice breaker. Passive candidates will understand that you have researched well about them and you care too.
Trust building
When you are trying to win passive candidates, you should prove that you really care for them. This is a great way to win them faster than your competitor. In order to create an atmosphere of care, you should plan and do custom communication with each target passive candidate.
In order to engage passive candidates, sending bunches of emails is not going to add any value. You have to always remember that these people are already satisfied with their employer and they will not like to contact you as you like to contact them. So, you have to keep your energy and patience up. You should make them feel that you really want to hire them because of their qualification and expertise. Otherwise, all your emails will end up in their spam boxes.
You know that all passive candidates receive such emails on a regular basis from various recruiters. So, you should not expect an instant reply or any reply until you put enough effort there. You should craft an effective strategy to stand out.
Build a strong employment brand
This is another effective way to engage passive candidates. When you call a passive candidate, there is a high possibility that he/she will check your company details, culture, and what present and ex-employees are saying about your organization. You can ask your existing employees to share how they feel to work at your organizations on various platforms like Glassdoor, ambition box, and in the review section of the Google local listing. If you can create a good environment and culture, attracting as well as engaging passive candidates will be that hard.
- Craft and excellent candidate experience
If the interview process and communication process are complicated, attracting active candidates also becomes a challenge. And the situation gets extremely tougher to hire passive candidates.
When it comes to how to hire passive candidates, we suggest concentrating on candidate experience. From the very first step of hiring, a candidate should feel welcomed and comfortable. Even if you do not find a candidate suitable for the post, you should make that candidate feel welcomed. If you provide standard candidate experience, then interviewed candidates will share positive words about their interviews with you to their friends, family, and professional circle. And from there, you can easily get a quality candidate who will want to join your company in the near future. When it comes to building a good culture of the organization, you should not miss developing a good candidate experience for all active and passive candidates.
- Do not hire too quickly
We can understand that there is solid pressure to fill the vacancy as soon as possible. But that does not mean you will skip necessary hiring and decision-making steps to have one onboard. In hurry, if you hire the wrong candidate, you will commit an expensive mistake without any doubt. Again you have to invest both time and money to find the most suitable one. After taking several interviews if you do not find the most suitable one, we will suggest keeping in touch with them but carry on your search to find the best one. When it comes to how to hire passive candidates, it includes a lot of steps and you should follow everything step by step.
- Convince reluctant candidates
It is true that passive candidates remain reluctant about accepting a new job offer. They cannot decide which organization is the best option for them. They feel somehow disloyal to their current employer. We must say it is easy to convince a reluctant passive candidate as he/she is half-convinced already and you just have to put the right efforts to make the candidate accept your job offer.
You should practice good convincing skills so that turning a reluctant candidate into an employee becomes easy for you. In this process, you can include the hiring manager as he/she will have sharper skills to convince a passive candidate with the best logic.
In these ways, you can source and engage passive candidates. But the way you are choosing and the steps you are finding are really effective or not-you have to understand that. A lot of organizations suffer from choosing the wrong ways of hiring passive candidates.
Make it easy with an applicant tracking system or an HRMS
In order to check the effectiveness of your hiring steps, you can take the help of an applicant tracking system. An applicant tracking system is always helpful in understanding the response of all passive candidates. In this way, you can purely streamline the entire process and keep everything organized. When everything is organized and easy to access, offering a supreme candidate experience is not a hard job.
From preparing the effective job post to offering the offer letter to the most suitable candidate- an applicant tracking system can help you in all steps of passive candidate hiring. Finding out candidates and sorting them based on the skills and requirements no longer require a lot of time and manual effort. A little manual effort and a few seconds are enough to complete the mentioned tasks.
Actually, when it is about how to hire passive candidates easily while delivering supreme, we need to become faster and there should be no errors. If we try to handle the entire procedure manually, it will require a lot of time. The vacancy will be active for a longer and competing with other companies will make the situation more complicated.
While choosing the best applicant tracking system, you have to be truly careful. The market is filled with a lot of applicant tracking systems and you have to choose the best one according to your requirements and budget. Once you equipped the HR team with an advanced ATS, you will find hiring passive candidates is easier than ever. Some human resource management software solutions also come with facilities like job post preparation, publishing in leading platforms, storing resumes, and so on. According to your requirements, you should choose the best one.
Conclusion
If you are a recruitment professional, we must spend a lot of time thinking about how to hire passive candidates. During our initial days, we used to think the same. Years of deep research, first-hand experience, use of advanced technologies, and expert professionals of our organization have made it easy to hire passive candidates without pouring much effort.
At the same time, we realized the need for more advanced software solutions in the field of hiring and human resource management. And as a result, we have developed an advanced HRMS solution so that hiring candidates to manage employees- everything becomes super easy for any HR department in any organization.
HRMWARE is an advanced cloud-based hr management software solution with the best features to support your hiring and employee management requirements. And the best fact is that it is completely free for organizations that are running with up to 10 employees.