How to Recruit Active and Passive Candidates

Active and passive candidates, who should you focus your recruitment efforts on?

Success lies in a mixed strategy, meaning that both assets and liabilities are considered by the Marketing and Talent Attraction teams.

Active candidates are all those who are actively looking for work. He's willing to join immediately and needs the job.

The liabilities, are those who are not actively seeking but it doesn't mean that they can't be interested in a change. They represent the bulk of the total number of candidates in the market (70%), they are usually comfortable in their current job, but not 100%.

Where to find active and passive candidates?

The assets are always available to recruitment teams through the different recruitment sources: the company's website or app, employment portals, corporate social networks... The candidate signs up by himself and the effort on the part of the recruiter is minimal.

But how do you get to that 70% of passive candidates? This is where Inbound Recruiting comes into play, that is, the strategy that is based on attracting candidates with striking profiles of greater talent and potential.

The problem is that passive candidates are never going to look for us. As good as our content is, candidates won't get to it on their own. Human Resources Marketing has an enormous impact on this point: the ability to attract qualified candidates to the company beyond traditional recruitment campaigns.

How to design a strategy for active and passive candidates

Success lies in a mixed strategy, meaning that both assets and liabilities are considered by the Marketing and Talent Attraction teams.

Strategy with Active Candidates

Focus on the plot and forget about the attraction. The candidate is already willing to listen to you. Now the most important thing is that you have minutes (or seconds) to convince him to work with you and not with the competition.

Ensure a fast and flexible process, the active candidate is in several processes at the same time and they are declined by one or the other depending on effectiveness and conditions.

Prepare a clear and direct value proposition. The reality is that the clearer you are, the clearer the candidate will be too (for better or worse, it will be easier for him to decide).

Try to sell an experience and not a job with a salary and a schedule. This point is one of the most important. In the selection and hiring process, we must be able to define objectives and communicate based on them.

“We have to be realistic. An active candidate is not eternally active. The active candidate And qualified it lasts no more than 10 days at the market”

Strategy with Passive Candidates

In this case, the work will be somewhat more complex. We start from a comfortable base for the candidate, so the recruiter's effort must be greater.

Build a relationship of trust. It is important that you always keep in mind the real situation: a candidate who is not looking for a

change, but the one you want to have on your team. Your refusal may come sooner rather than later. You must get him to see you as a mirror of his professional and personal projection and not as a seller of encyclopedias.

Look for vital reasons for the job change. The communication argument must always be linked to vital elements for the candidate. We will not convince you of the change if we resort to banal arguments such as the schedule, health insurance or the gym in the office. We must be able to transform all these concepts into vital needs for the candidate: arriving home early to be with their children, the safety and health of their family with private health insurance,...

It assumes longer and intermittent communication with the candidate. Unfortunately, the selection processes for passive candidates are longer. On the one hand, communications are more intermittent because when we are working we must adapt to their schedules (which are not always compatible with ours). But, in addition, decision-making on their part is more complicated because of the opportunity cost for them to give up their current situation.

The ideal would be to combine both campaigns because both can give us qualified users. It is true that for immediate recruitment we will almost never be able to use passive candidates, but if we are able to design attraction campaigns for both types, talent attraction figures will improve significantly at the end of the year and

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