In a 4% unemployment market, attracting passive candidates should be more than a strategy — it should be a lifestyle. Carefully and consistently cultivating relationships with potential job seekers well before they start their search is today’s imperative if you want to stay ahead in the recruiting game.  

If you’ve ever wondered how talent agencies nurture positive relationships with passive candidates, we can help? This article will teach you a few of the tricks commonly used to nurture passive job candidates to improve your time to hire. 

How to Find Passive Job Candidates 

In an economy where almost everyone is employed, we know that passive job candidates are the best targets to fill up the seats on your corporate bus. Yet few corporate hiring teams, and certainly no one in a small business has the time to proactively look for talent for roles that may not even be open yet.  

The good news is that staffing firms are experts in this practice, and have been at it for years, sometimes decades. These companies understand that, even during low unemployment, about 50% of employees are thinking about quitting their jobs. The pipeline of a staffing firm makes these partnerships desirable and fruitful for companies seeking talent. How in the world are they able to find talent even when that talent isn’t looking for a job? 

Here are ten ways to attract passive job candidates: 

  1. Make sure your company website reflects your company values, culture, and the perks employees receive. 
  2. Create workplace culture videos and share them on every social channel and including your website. 
  3. Write catchy, fun, and exciting job descriptions. 
  4. Use social media to attract more candidates, from Facebook paid ads to develop followers on Twitter. 
  5. Use events to network with your target candidate audience.  
  6. Ask your teams for help with referrals to their social networks and offer them referral bonuses for anyone you hire. 
  7. Each recruiter on your team should actively reach out to candidates on LinkedIn to add them to their social network. 
  8.  Have consistent visibility on social media networks to be in stay in front of passive candidates. 
  9. Keep a running database of potential candidates that might fit your company culture. 
  10. Pay attention to companies having layoffs or rightsizing; there are potential employees found in every economic downturn. 

Creating connections to passive candidates requires HR teams to proactively work social relationships to develop a pipeline of potential employees. It also requires these teams to create a culture of recruiting that permeates an organization to help it succeed. It’s a constant process of selling the company, the culture, and the opportunity, even when it doesn’t appear on the surface that the potential candidate is interested in switching jobs. 

Talk With Our Team of Experts!

These are all techniques used every day by Exelare’s clients. We help companies build passive and active candidate networks with the best applicant tracking software on the market today. Talk to our team about how we can jump-start your recruiting process with the tools to find top talent.