Searching high and low for candidates, but still turning up empty-handed? You could be missing out on talent in plain sight – candidates who are already in your funnel.
If you think you’ve exhausted all your options and outlets for sourcing qualified candidates, try these techniques for discovering and re-discovering potential hires for your role.
Audit your media.
Consider running through the content in your company’s social profiles, outreach, and other external messaging channels to check that what’s being communicated is accurate, pinpoints your target candidate audience, and reflects the employer brand.
- On your social media profiles, are the posts, pictures, and status updates still representative of your company and team today? Do you have content on the site that could get you into legal trouble, like discussing which customers you work with or implying which investors may be funding your next round? Are you frequently and consistently posting updates, or is your last post from a few weeks ago?
- In your email outreach and message footers, are you including links to press articles? (You should! This helps build credibility and lets candidates know the company is up to big things, and that they can be a part of it.) Are these articles relevant and from the same year? Are you linking to the latest product update? Are these updates still applicable and do these links route to the correct page?
- Got a company blog? Is there content on your site that is no longer relevant to your product or team, like an old feature or promo, or an article about a new department head who’s no longer with the company? Are all the pictures and embedded links working?
Check through every detail of the team’s outreach to make sure links are relevant, up to date, and working.
Do another run-through of your candidate funnel.
Remember those candidates you put off to re-engage with later? Now may be a good time to reconnect with them. Just as you did with your media, audit your talent funnel and peek at the profiles of candidates to find out who may be open to a new opportunity. (Entelo’s More Likely to Move™ feature can help you find these candidates.)
Running an audit of your talent funnel also helps to make sure you’re not skipping out on candidates whom you’ve sourced but haven’t yet established initial outreach or followed up with after an interview or first email.
Were you in touch with a candidate who was interested in the opportunity but working with another company at the time? Are they still working with that company, or are they looking for a new role? How about that candidate who was almost the right fit for the job, but missing some chops for the position at the time? Maybe he or she now has the experience you were searching for after time in their most recent role. Don’t forget to delve into your employees’ networks, too, to find even more hidden talent.
Dig even deeper into analyzing the way talent trickles into your funnel by assessing the way your team sources candidates.
Reassess the team’s process for qualifying candidates.
Noticing a drop-off in how many candidates are coming your way? It could be because there’s a miscommunication between the company’s recruiters and hiring managers. Sync up the team to make sure the specs for the role and the right candidate are aligned. What types of experiences and what kind of background does a potential hire have? What are some reasons a previous interviewee didn’t make it past the screening stage? Recruiters who struggle to find candidates for a long period of time often start to harden their hiring criteria and overlook talent who may not exactly fit the list of requirements, but who have the potential to be trained into the role instead.
On the flip side, checking in with your recruiters’ body language could be the difference between attracting or turning off potential hires. The Undercover Recruiter suggests moderating these key factors, especially while performing interviews: Eye contact, use of filler words, hygiene and physical appearance, and approachability. You can sell the opportunity to a candidate, but if they leave the interview with the impression team members are standoffish, unknowledgeable, unconfident, or rude, they’re likely to think the company isn’t the right fit and start looking for another role elsewhere.
Set a clear process and expectations for recruiters and the talent they’re qualifying to make sure no candidates are falling through the cracks.
What techniques are you using to refresh the team’s sourcing and hiring strategies? Share them with us in the comments and while you're at it, download our eBook on effectively messaging candidates, too!
