Best tips and tools to source and engage passive candidates
As a recruiter, your success depends on how well you can source and engage passive candidates. The job boards are not delivering the results anymore.
When you are sourcing passive candidates, you need to step up your cold recruiting email game. Here are a few pointers to help you get started.
Personalise your email outreach
Passive candidates are not looking for a new opportunity. They are probably perfectly happy where they are. You need to be compelling to cajole them out of their comrfort zone so they are engaging with you. You need to make sure your target candidates know that this email was written personally to them. There is something flattering to receive an email that says you are wanted!
Be brief and concise
People don’t have time for rambling. They couldn’t care less. If they see a long email, reader is quickly going to lose interest and hit archive button, even if you’ve got a great opportunity with a great company.
If you want to get replies, be brief, direct and interesting. This will help you catch their attention and get responses. Here are a few ways you can immediately grab their attention
- Flattery – Compliment them on their project or a recent blog they wrote. Works in almost all cases.
- Find a mutual connection – Establish trust immediately if you can reference someone you both know and admire
- Humour – Nobody can resist reading a good joke. You are doing cold outreach and most people hate it. One way to get around it – disarm them by being brutally honest and funny about it!
Challenge the candidate
One characteristics of great people is that they run towards challenges and not shy away from them. Every organisation and role is rift with challenges. Recruiters make a mistake of painting a super rosy picture.
Being truthful about challenges has two fold benefits.
- It excites your prospective candidate
- It builds trust as reader is bound to believe what you say
Make it really easy for them take action
Even if you write a super personal email and end it with “Take this programming test” or “apply on careers page”, it most definitely won’t work. Remember, who’s selling to whom. You need to make it really easy for your candidates to take a further action.
The most common calls to action that work are “Just hit reply” or “Let’s jump on a brief call”. That’s it. It is much easier to say yes to this than go through an elaborate test or a boring application process.
Always follow up
There are a millions of reasons why your email wasn’t replied to. Maybe they never opened it. Maybe they were too busy to respond to you. Maybe, despite your best efforts, they weren’t persuaded to respond to you.
Whatever the reason, you should never give up on the first email. Always follow up with the candidates. According to research conducted by Recruiterflow, the response rates triple if you follow up with 3 more emails. (Read the full report here.)
Recruiting tools to help you
You need modern tools to tackle the recruiting challenges and stay ahead of the curve. Here’s a list of tools that can help you automate a lot of your day and make you a master of passive recruiting.
Sourcing
Sourcehub: A free tool that helps you make boolean search queries. Just input skills, locations and the social network you want to search and it will throw out a boolean string to help you get started. You can start with this string and tweak around to get the perfect results that you want.
Applicant tracking and email automation
Recruiterflow: Recruiterflow is one of the highest rated recruiting software. With separate modules for both agency recruiters and in-house recruiters, it packs a punch with it’s sourcing and email automation features. With it’s beautiful UI and useful features, it gives you a complete freedom from managing messy spreadsheets when you are sourcing candidates.
GMass: Gmass is a simple to use mail merge tool. If you extensively use google sheets to source candidates, this tool comes in handy for mail-merge. With a few steps, you can automatically send emails to all the people in the sheet that you’ve maintained.
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