This is the sixth post in a seven-part series entitled “Outbound Recruiting 101.” It focuses on best practices when reaching out to passive candidates during recruiting. Reaching out to passive candidates is something that almost every fast-growth company does as part of their recruiting efforts. That being said, it can be done respectfully or disrespectfully. We strongly encourage the former. 
Please keep in mind throughout this series of posts that your company’s brand is at stake when you are contacting candidates. Of course, treat the person you’re contacting as you would like to be treated (we call this the Outbound Golden Rule!).
Tip #6: Manage your outreach and interactions. Most companies, and almost all startups, don’t do this well. They’ll send an email to a candidate and have no record of who they’ve reached out to and when. Then, a few months later when they’re looking to fill a position, they come across a very promising candidate and the immediate thought is “Did I email this person already?” Avoid this.
There are great tools available to manage interactions with your candidates and they’re often not your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Some ATS platforms do a good job of enabling you to handle interactions with people who you're waiting to hear back from, but most don't. Instead, you should plan to set up a separate, parallel system to track who you’ve reached out to and what, if any, interaction you’ve had with a given candidate.
A couple of options:
Entelo - In terms of CRM functionality, Entelo can best be described as ultra-lightweight CRM. It’s certainly not a full- fledged CRM or ATS platform but for the purposes of tracking interactions with candidates that you're reaching out to, it's an excellent option. You can add candidates to lists, take notes on them and forward candidate profiles to other members of your team. If you’re using Entelo to search for candidates, we recommend trying out Entelo's CRM functionality in parallel. It's a complimentary feature that could add a lot of texture to your Entelo experience. Of course, if it doesn't suit your needs, there will be other options to choose from.
Highrise - We wrote a blog post on how Highrise can be used to manage your talent pipeline. It’s a great and inexpensive alternative for managing your candidates. One of the benefits of using Highrise is that you can integrate Rapportive with it (read: a super slick hack we blogged about here).
What do you want to track? Each interaction, attempted *and* successful. Track every time you send an email or make a phone call. If you get a response from the candidate, make a note of that as well. Pay close attention to anything that might indicate future availability. For example, often a candidate will say something like “I’m occupied for now but might start looking for something at the end of the year.” No problem -- set a due date for following back up. Tools like followup.cc can help you manage the timing of your interactions, as you can send an email away from your inbox for the time being and schedule it to show back up when you're ready to reach out again. So a candidate tells you that he's going to start looking for his next opportunity in six months? Schedule that email chain to show up at the top of your inbox in six months, to the day. Not a bad way to impress someone you're trying to hire. :)
Finally, your CRM solution should have team-sharing functionality. Then, when others on your team comes across an impressive candidate, they'll be able to see if that candidate has had any interaction with your company.
Keeping track of your interactions with all candidates is very powerful. You'll have an organized network of candidate connections, and a record of the outcomes of each of those interactions. Needless to say, having an organized record will be incredibly useful particularly when it comes time for you to take on your next opportunity, as it will make the transition much more friction-less for your company.
Stay tuned for 1 more Outbound Recruiting tip. Can you guess what it's going to be? Leave your thoughts in the comments section!