The digitisation of HR provides many tools to broaden the pool of candidates – especially when it comes to getting to hard-to-reach, passive candidates. With the competition increasing, how can companies use next-gen HR tech to engage passive candidates?
- Develop a content strategy
The HR department is going digital and learning from marketing: and the first lesson has been that content is king. The content strategy has a direct impact on employer attractiveness.
To market a business to in-demand talent, then build a relationship with an audience of these passive candidates, to sustain it and to use it in the long term, it is essential to offer quality content that keeps passive candidates interested in a business. This is a long-term investment which requires the involvement of many stakeholders as part of the employer brand. As such there needs to be a concerted strategy, developed by HR, marketing and other brand guardians.
- Use inbound recruiting to nurture potential candidates
Inbound recruiting focuses on attracting passive talents rather than looking for them. The objective is to create a pool of talent to nurture and convert into candidates when the right offer arises. Again, this demands a long-term relationship that starts with creating content adapted to target profiles but adds the crucial component of converting these candidates into employees, usually in the short or medium term.
In practice, this means consistent use of various digital channels to introduce a business to target talent audiences, and as such, can place large demands on HR and IT teams that are already stretched.
- Understand the lifecycle of recruitment advertisements
Digital HR – especially digital recruitment – is based on the idea of continual innovation. It is no longer enough to simply place an advertisement on job boards. Next generation recruitment advertisement strategies must now account for the fact that adverts can be targeted at specific audiences and optimised to improve performance over its lifecycle.
This evolution can help take advantage of new technologies or formats. Interactive content is a rapidly growing area of next generation recruitment advertising, with notable improvements in conversion.
- Do not overlook newsletters and mailing lists
Many recruiters often overlook the existing pools of candidate data that they have developed – typically seen in newsletter sign ups or email lists. If a business has kept in regular contact with potential candidates, this can be a rapid and effective option for recruitment.
The detail within email lists is often overlooked. Potential candidates will have provided email address, location, interests, the type of position sought, salary expectations and a range of other data. All these elements can be used to send these selected candidates targeted information with good conversion rates and a low cost.
- Retargeting campaigns
Retargeting is the process of reconnecting with an individual who has already interacted with a company. Technically, they are a candidate who is potentially interested in the company, but who has not yet applied.
Retargeting offers dedicated content via different media and formats to reignite this relationship. For example: a candidate watches an employer-branded video on YouTube and shows interest by watching the entire video: they are then targeted elsewhere online by an advertisement or offer of a discussion with the company. By inviting this passive candidate to continue the conversation, a business can assess their progress towards becoming a candidate and ultimately, an employee.
- Social media targeting
Social networks enable incredible accuracy in targeting potential candidates. Typically, engagement is increased, and the impact of communications is multiplied tenfold.
There is, however, a lot of risk in trying to attract large pools of people via these networks. Too often a business will not engage in developing a detailed understanding of the competitive environment, expectations of candidates and the specific characteristics of the profiles being sought. This severely hampers the success of social media outreach as candidates either do not engage with the approaches, or even worse, develop a negative view of the company.
- Use existing employees
A truly smart strategy to attract passive candidates will leverage the enthusiasm of existing employees to make them ambassadors of the company’s values and turn them into active agents for promoting the company.
This may take the form of social media posting, blogs or even video streams or podcasts and the approach needs careful guidance and management to ensure that the image projected is both positive and consistent, but one of the most effective ways to attract passive candidates is to show them how they would work and ‘look’ as an employee.
Most of these approaches demonstrate that the digitalisation of HR has already begun for many businesses – and it is more a case of embracing existing technology, or refining processes, than being faced by the shock of the truly new. They also show that for any major enterprise, there are now more similarities than differences when it comes to the branding of a business across target markets and target talent. As a result, collaboration will be key if a business is to emerge victorious from the war for talent.
