3 Ways to Start Sourcing Passive Candidates Successfully

Whether you’ve been recruiting for ages or you’re just starting to build out your pipelines, one thing is true: The perfect candidate is usually already employed.

In fact, studies have shown that passive candidates are 120% more likely to have a strong impact on your company. That’s not a stat worth ignoring!

Passive sourcing also allows you to be more strategic with your company’s DE&I goals. Especially when studies have shown that organizations with higher gender and ethnic diversity perform up to 35% better than their competitors. Other studies have shown that being inclusive can help increase employee attendance by 1 day per employee per year!

In sourcing, an active candidate would be those that are actively applying for open positions. These types of job seekers come to you. Passive candidates, on the other hand, aren’t currently looking and are unaware the position even exists.

Sourcing passive candidates requires upfront work on the recruiter’s end to find these candidates, reach out to them, and hope to get a chance to even talk to them to be able to try and sell the position.

Although these candidates can be the most desirable, they’re also the toughest to get a hold of. Someone who is content in their current position isn’t usually submitting applications to open positions or responding to recruiter outreach.

As you can see, it can be a lot of work but the payoff is usually great. Keep reading for some ways that you can start sourcing passive candidates for your organization.

3 Ways to Start Sourcing Passive Candidates

Expand Your Social Media Searches

If you work in recruiting, then you have most likely made LinkedIn your best friend. Most recruiters are power users of LinkedIn and many candidates - especially the most desirable ones - have inboxes inundated with job offers and recruiter requests. This is going to make it really hard to stand out!

It’s time to get creative with your social searches. Try using Twitter’s advanced search to look for profiles that use industry-related keywords and hashtags. You can browse these profiles to find active, dedicated employees and reach out to them directly there.

Facebook’s advanced search can be another path to finding people with matching job titles or even another way to try contacting someone you’ve been eye-balling on LinkedIn.

Of course, this can be a very manual and time-consuming process if you’re not using a powerful sourcing tool. If you’re looking to incorporate passive sourcing, make sure any AI-powered platforms you’re using will also pull in social profiles from different channels. ProvenBase’s sourcing dashboard gives you all this information right from the contact record so that you can reach out instantly on any channels they are active on.

Establish a Referral Program

It’s no secret that referrals are the gold standard when it comes to generating leads. This is true across the board for creating new sales and for securing new talent.

In fact, 78% of recruiters say they find their best talent through referrals. Unfortunately, current employees need to be aware of open positions to be able to refer someone. Many organizations don’t send current openings to their internal team and miss huge opportunities there.

The strongest referral programs incentivize their employees to be proactive and consistently submit potential candidates to the pipeline. Especially when it comes to employee referrals, many people are waiting for a position to open so collecting these resumes to keep on hand can be a safe bet.

Invest in AI-powered Tools

Technology has changed every aspect of modern recruiting, especially sourcing. With the advent of modern sourcing technology, HR teams have never been able to find more candidates as quickly.

Of course, not all sourcing solutions are created equal. When researching a tool, it’s helpful to have specific problems in mind that you want this tool to solve. For example, we mentioned above that ProvenBase pulls in related social profiles for candidates for you, saving huge amounts of time.

When researching AI-powered sourcing technologies, you’ll notice that not many have a solution for reaching out to passive candidates who might be interested in a new position. With most tools, you’ll have to reach out to cold leads and hope they bite. We thought it would be amazing to have a feature that tells you how likely someone is to be receptive to your position before you even think about messaging them.

ProvenBase’s Open to Opportunities feature does exactly that.

The intuitive, AI-powered algorithm uses hundreds of data points to give you a good understanding if a candidate who is currently employed would be open to discussing a new position. This has been game-changing for HR professionals and time-saving as well.

From the first search, you can save time by only messaging candidates that are likely to be open to opportunities. This feature can change the process for busy hiring managers who often don’t have time to dedicate to passive sourcing. Using Open to Opportunities within ProvenBase allows organizations to make room for passive sourcing in their current process.

A Perfect Pair

Of course, a well-formed sourcing strategy will always combine both active and passive sourcing. Manual candidate sourcing is still an integral part of the process — requiting requires a human element that no technology can replicate!

However, AI tools in combination with manual sourcing effects can free up time, create a stronger and more diverse pipeline, and have a huge payoff.

If you’re interested in seeing how ProvenBase can supercharge your sourcing, contact us for a demo!