03/03/2016  //  By deanna kane  //  Recruitment Marketing //  Talent Acquisition
[socialwrap][socialicon name=”linkedin”][socialicon name=”twitter”][/socialwrap]Building and nurturing a passive candidate pipeline is key to your company’s long-term recruitment strategy. To successfully attract these candidates, it’s important to remember this group is not proactively looking for a new job. It’s up to you to authentically capture their interest, instead of expecting them to find you. Here are six ways to authentically engage passive job candidates.

1. Grow your inbound recruitment marketing strategy

Attracting passive candidates through a “post-and-pray” approach will not work. Make sure your company is easy for them to discover by ensuring your online presence is up-to-date, and attract them by creating content they are interested in. Actively manage your career-focused social media sites, respond to any outstanding comments or feedback on career sites like LinkedIn, Glassdoor or The Muse, and test your careers page to confirm it is mobile optimized.

2. One-to-one communication

Initiate the first point of contact with passive candidates, and remember it can’t be a hard sell of your company’s open positions. Tailor your communication to each particular candidate. Instead of selling your company to candidates, get to know them in order to understand if they are a culture match for your organization, if they fit into your company’s long-term hiring goals and if they can fill any potential talent gaps.

3. Create regular candidate touch points

Ensure you have continual touch points with your talent community, to stay top of mind with these passive candidates. Send them regular communication that might include updates on company awards or accolades, open positions, industry events or networking opportunities. Regularly update your careers page to ensure it reflects your current recruitment marketing efforts.  

4. Highlight lesser-known company perks

Since passive candidates aren’t actively looking to leave their job immediately, it’s important to highlight additional benefits outside of job responsibilities, benefits and pay. Highlight your company’s unique benefits, such as career path, growth opportunities, flexible work arrangements or any other lesser-known benefits, in which active candidates may not be searching.

5. Develop an employee referral program

Create an employee referral program to incentivize your current employees to recruit top talent in their networks. Referrals can be your company’s greatest talent asset by eliminating candidate doubt, saving on cost-per-hire, cutting down on time-intensive interviews, and is also a great way for recruitment teams to scale their efforts.

6. Leverage recruitment software to distribute the message

The additional communication required to authentically engage passive candidates doesn’t need to create hours of extra work. Leverage recruitment software to do your heavy lifting, by automating email or text campaigns to authentically engage the candidates in your talent community.

Has your goal to attract the best and the brightest been a slow process? Learn how recruiting software will speed it up.