3 Ways to Attract Passive Candidates

It’s no secret that today’s hiring climate is complex and competitive. Organizations are scrambling, fighting with one another over the best talent on the market, and it’s crucial to find an edge or leg up on the competition.

One way to avoid the battle over active candidates is to shift your focus toward attracting, recruiting, and retaining talented, passive candidates. These candidates are already established within their given company, meaning that the journey to win them over might be tougher. But with the right approach, you can not only attract passive candidates to your organization but also build out a talent pool that you can tap into down the road. Check out our 3 tips for winning over passive candidates in today’s hiring space.

1. Focus On The Job Description

The job description is something that many people overlook or spend very little time crafting, which can be detrimental to your recruiting efforts.

You see, the job description is often the very first interaction a candidate has with your company and is the first impression you leave on potential hires. Before they ever communicate with you or talk to a hiring manager, they’re reading through the description of the role you wrote, clinging to each word and line as insight into the culture of your company and the actual realities of performing the job.

When it comes to passive candidates, your job description needs to be catchy and attention-grabbing to engage them and nurture their interest. These candidates are not actively looking for and applying to new positions. They’re well established in their role, and it often takes something significant to convince them to look for employment elsewhere.

By writing an excellent job description that highlights your company’s strengths, the benefits you offer employees, and the culture you curate at work, you can showcase why a passive candidate should work for you instead.

Bonus Material: Need some help with crafting the perfect job description? Download our resource to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward!

2. Look Outside Traditional Avenues

As we stated earlier, passive candidates will not be actively perusing job sites and professional platforms for new career opportunities. To find and engage these candidates, you need to get creative with where you invest your efforts.

Social media and networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are excellent areas to interact with passive candidates. You can start by building out personal networks with talented passive candidates, then spend time interacting with them in order to build rapport.

LinkedIn allows you to filter your searches and refine the kind of individuals you connect and interact with. That way, when a position opens up in your company, you will already have made connections with potential candidates. This saves you from those dreaded cold emails and cold calls.

Facebook and Twitter are great opportunities for you to broadcast your employer brand to the world. By posting pictures highlighting your workplace culture, you can garner interest in your organization and establish the image you want to portray to future job seekers.

3. Invest In A Talent Exchange Network

At the end of the day, sometimes, you just need the support of an outsourced candidate research firm to generate a list of qualified passive candidates. Talent exchange networks like IQTalent Xchange can help take the burden of passive candidate research and candidate sourcing off your plate, alleviating stress and giving you more time to interact with and engage candidates.

When you invest in passive candidate research through IQTX, our expert researchers work hard using the newest technology to build out a comprehensive list of passive talent that you can tap. The best part? The list of candidates we find for you is yours to keep forever. This means you’ll not only enjoy the added support and insights of our experts, but you’ll have an expanded talent pool, along with all their contact information, that you can use down the road for any future open positions.

The IQTalent Xchange network takes our passive candidate research a step further with our latest program addition, Diversify by IQTX ™. Now, our team of researchers can work to generate a list of diverse, passive talent to help you hire equitably and inclusively.

What does this mean?

You and your team can pinpoint underrepresented populations within your workforce, relay this information to our team, and in return, have a well-built list of candidates that help to enhance the diversity of your workplace. Using the most advanced AI paired with our human expertise, we can help you ensure your talent pipeline is inclusive.

Finding and recruiting passive candidates can be tricky, but the level of skill and experience they bring to the role makes them ideal candidates. Recruiters need to think outside the box to catch the attention of these job seekers. By focusing your efforts on creating a stellar job description that highlights the best aspects of your organization and rethinking your approaches to interacting with passive candidates, you can start building out a talent pool for you to rely on down the road.

IQTalent Xchange is here to help you with your search for passive candidates. Our cutting-edge AI and expert researchers and sourcers are trained to find the right candidates for you, taking into account your diversity and inclusion goals. Gone are the days of sifting through piles of resumes and searching the corners of LinkedIn for potential hires. Instead, invest in our candidate research and pull from a ranked list of experienced passive candidates, complete with all the data you need for outreach. To learn more about IQTalent Xchange or to get started on your passive candidate research, reach out to our team of experts today.