Attracting Passive Candidates: The Key to Expanding Your Talent Pool

Say you own a home and urgently find yourself needing an electrician or a roofer. That initial urgency is made so much more stressful when you need to spend an hour frantically searching for local services, briefly assessing their reviews, and gambling on the hope that the one you call is a good one.

The experience is a lot smoother if you have a collection of recommended services at the ready whenever the need arises.

Similarly, employers who have a talent pool of passive candidates often have a much smoother and less stressful experience filling open roles—especially when a new hire is needed urgently, whether it’s to backfill a vacated position or deliver on a new business need.

Tapping into a passive candidate network significantly expands the available talent pool for employers and enables faster hiring. Rather than waiting for the ideal candidate to show up in your inbox, they’re already there waiting for your email.

Recruiting passive candidates gives employers a strategic advantage in a competitive hiring landscape, but these pools don’t fill themselves. Key focus areas for building your passive powerhouse include employer branding, personalized outreach, and flexible interview options that will help you more effectively engage passive candidates.

What Are Passive Candidates?

Passive candidates are employed professionals who are not actively searching for a new job but would consider an appealing opportunity if presented with one. They are often more experienced and highly skilled applicants. But rather than actively applying and interviewing for new jobs, they’re either content in their current roles or waiting for an opening in their discipline to appear on your careers page.

In other words, they’re keeping their options open.

Sometimes, these are folks who feel they’ve reached a plateau in their current roles. They don’t want to leave prematurely, but they are on the lookout for opportunities to grow.

Other passive candidates may be casually searching for opportunities that will help them relocate to a more appealing city, put new or different skills and interests into professional practice, or bring them back into the workforce after a career break spent caregiving or studying a new field.

Companies building talent pools of passive candidates often have a general job application on their careers page, inviting professionals to submit their resumes for consideration for future openings. Those applications stay in a recruiting database that can be browsed as new roles arise.

Building a Strong Employer Brand

Critically, these companies with such a wide talent pool intentionally nurture passive candidates with periodic communication to ensure they stay top-of-mind. This will help them think of you first, should their job search become more urgent, and increase their level of excitement if you reach out to them to schedule an interview for a new role.

However, those benefits only come to fruition if you make a concerted effort to highlight your company’s values, workplace environment, and employee experiences. The goal is to showcase, through various channels, why your organization is a great place to work.

Step one, of course, is to define your employer brand if you haven’t already. What makes your culture and workplace unique? How do you articulate the benefits and environment you offer in a recognizable, trademark voice and style that candidates will remember?

Once that’s in order, you can showcase that style in many ways:

• Update your company website with a few pages dedicated to telling your brand story.
• Leverage social media platforms like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Instagram.
• Encourage your employees to share their positive experiences, further reinforcing your brand’s appeal to potential passive candidates.
• Set up email drip campaigns—more on these in the next section!

All of these communications should share employee testimonials, company milestones, and community involvement to reinforce your brand’s positive image.

Leveraging Personalized & Proactive Outreach

Take note: These are called “passive” candidates because of their level of activity, not yours. As a prospective employer, it’s your job to keep these leads warm and keep your brand within sight and on the minds of everyone in your talent pool.

Some ways to directly engage with passive candidates over time include:

• Networking Events: Reach out to passive candidates through LinkedIn messages or emails to notify them of your presence at industry events in their area. You can invite them to stop by your booth or schedule some time to say hello or start a conversation about current and future opportunities.
• Tailored Email Messages: Your email drip campaigns—a scheduled series of periodic emails sent to your database of passive candidates—should have room for customization. Personalize your outreach to highlight what would specifically appeal to the candidate, such as career growth opportunities, work-life balance, or innovative projects.
• Invitations to Apply to New Roles: While your recruiting tech stack should send automated notifications to passive candidates when a new role in their discipline has opened, you should make a point to invite top talent to apply. They’re much less likely to overlook an actual recruiter’s email.

In each example, make sure you engage without pressure. Begin with casual, noncommittal conversations to gauge the candidate’s interest without overwhelming them or pushing sales-like tactics that will make them shy away from your outreach.

Offering Flexible & Low-Commitment Interview Options

As you work with passive candidates, you may notice that their responsiveness and sense of urgency differ from those of more active candidates. They may not be in such a hurry to find a new job; they may also just be busy and have a harder time fitting lengthy interviews into their schedule.

Improve the experience for your recruiters and these candidates by offering flexible interview options. For example:

• Offer On Demand Screenings: Inviting candidates to complete a screening interview at their own convenience, rather than trying to schedule a phone call (or, worse, just impulsively calling them), can help you get these early-stage conversations accomplished much faster.
• Conduct Interviews Remotely, Via Video: Virtual interviews can significantly reduce the time, effort, and cost required for passive candidates to participate.
• Respect Their Time: Recruiters and hiring managers must be willing to be flexible with scheduling to accommodate passive candidates’ busy schedules.
  
  Additionally, consider offering self-service, automated interview scheduling to minimize the back-and-forth conversations required to get these conversations on the books.
  

Again, the goal of each of these accommodations is to make the candidate experience as smooth and hassle-free as possible.

Nurturing Long-Term Relationships

Creating a talent pipeline of passive candidates means you have a ready-made list of applicants for new roles as they arise. It also means you don’t need to lose highly skilled candidates to the void just because you don’t have a perfect opening for them right this moment.

Once you’ve started filling this pool, personalized, thoughtful follow-ups can help you stay at the top of passive candidates’ lists of desirable employers as they casually peruse new opportunities over time.

This may take more effort than letting the applicants come to you, but the rewards are great: more qualified candidates, faster hiring, an improved candidate experience, and much more.

Need to learn more? Check out our eBook on how video interviewing can improve the candidate experience. And when you’re ready, reach out to us to learn more about the interviewstream platform. We’d be happy to walk you through some best practices for nurturing passive candidates and leveraging the right recruiting tech to increase your odds of an accepted offer.

About The Author

Drew Whitehurst is the Director of Marketing, RevOps, and Product Strategy at interviewstream. He's been with the company since 2014 working in client services and marketing. He is an analytical thinker, coffee enthusiast, and hobbyist at heart.