How to Make Passive Candidates Want to Work for Your Company

After developing a successful business, your organization knows how to recruit active candidates. However, sometimes active candidates aren’t always the right fit. So what do you do when the people who are interested in working for your company right away aren’t the right people for the open jobs?

Active candidates are individuals who are looking for a job to start immediately. Passive candidates already have job security and a strong track record, making them more challenging to recruit. Still, when you can recruit them, you can reduce employee turnover and find a lasting employee.

Making Passive Candidates Want to Work for You

Passive candidates are not actively looking for jobs, but they have the skills that make them the perfect candidate for your open position. These individuals may have their resumes posted on a job board like Indeed, or you may have come across their profiles on LinkedIn. Engaging with these individuals means finding potential candidates who likely aren’t looking for a new job or may not know your organization is looking for them.

Essentially, making candidates want to work for you is about generating demand and building brand awareness. Here’s how you can make passive candidates want to work for your company.

Get to Know Them

Once you’ve identified potential candidates, you’ll need to send them a prospecting email or connect with them on LinkedIn. You should learn more about them before you connect with them, no matter how you are connecting.

Be sure to review their skills and experience. This background information can help you determine whether or not someone could be the right match for your organization.

Go Beyond Job Sites

You can use a variety of networks to conduct candidate research and find candidates. For example, you can find web designers on online communities dedicated to web design or Instagram, where they may showcase their work.

A prospective candidate’s online activity can help you understand their main motivations, which you can use to personalize your messages to them when you reach out. This will improve your chances of getting a response and finding the best candidate for the job.

Emphasize Opportunities

Recruiters are predominately looking for a candidate to fill a job. However, if the candidate is changing jobs that means a major change. When a recruiter approaches someone, they will ask themselves why they should make this life change.

Many candidates would stay in their current positions, especially if it means they could get more pay. People don’t always leave their jobs for more money, though. Many qualified workers are looking for better employee engagement and communication, while others want more potential for growth within a company.

Learning about potential new hires can help recruiters understand what a candidate needs in a job that their current position doesn’t offer. Then, you can explain how this new job will be beneficial to their career, goals, and more.

Build a Strong Brand

If you’re reaching out to passive candidates, you need to show them how the position is a good opportunity by demonstrating your company is better than their current company. This can be shown by letting them know more about the business, including your corporate culture if you offer charitable giving, donations to local communities or nonprofits, better benefits, and more.

When you reach out to a candidate, they will likely research your company before they decide to respond. Companies with a strong web presence, branding, and good reviews are more likely to interest a passive candidate.

Offer a Great Experience

Recruiters can no longer reach out to individuals by asking them to fill out an application. Passive candidates particularly want to feel like the recruitment process is designed for them and they have a good candidate-recruiter relationship. Your candidate experience should make candidates feel like you’re there to help benefit them rather than simply filling a job position by taking them away from an already good opportunity.

A good candidate experience will help passive candidates feel more confident about leaving their current position for an opportunity that may seem like a risk.

Offer Better Work-life Balance

Now many people have experienced a good work-life balance due to remote work, many of them are considering leaving their current positions, where companies have remained inflexible. In addition, organizations that are ramping up their hiring are further creating problems for their recruiters. Not only do many candidates want to work remotely, but they have multiple offers available to them, which makes it more difficult to recruit passive candidates.

Companies who are unwilling to offer better flexibility to the candidates by offering a fully remote or hybrid environment are going to miss out on top talent.

Make the Application Process Easy

Remember, passive candidates already have jobs, which means they don’t have time in the day to take multiple interviews and fill out a long application. So when recruiting passive candidates, you’ll need to cater to their needs.

Instead of putting them through the same interview process as an active candidate, remember they are very busy already and won’t have time for a three-step interview process with multiple company decision-makers. Instead, build your application process around them, and have all of the decision-makers come to one single interview.

No passive candidate is going to jump through the same hoops as an active candidate because they aren’t desperate for work, so make sure you can engage your passive candidates by making the application process much easier for them.

Recruiting Passive Candidates

Recruiting passive candidates is going to be exponentially more difficult than recruiting active candidates. Anyone who already has job security doesn’t need to work for you, so you have to put in the extra effort to make them feel the need to work for your company.

The most important thing to remember when recruiting passive candidates is they will constantly be questioning whether or not working for your business is a good fit for them. Individuals with jobs are likely comfortable in their current situation at work, so it’s up to you to show them why your company can offer them a better opportunity.

About the author

Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys San Diego life, traveling, and music.