The difference between reactive recruitment and proactive recruitment is reactive recruitment depends on candidates applying for a position when it’s open whereas proactive recruitment focuses on recognizing talent, initiating contacts, establishing relationships and eventually making a candidate interested in an open job position or opportunity.
Proactive recruitment is based on attracting, adapting and sourcing candidates ahead of the hiring demand. The recruiters choose proactive hiring as it engages their candidates proactively which makes them stay ahead of the hiring demands. Proactive recruitments decreases time and cost per hire.
Proactive recruiters are team of marketers who treat their candidates like customers. Candidates that are once sourced enter into a sales funnel eventually resulting in candidates that works for your company.
The Five Phases of Proactive Recruiting
Discover
Finding a perfect candidate doesn’t mean reaching out to anyone, it means reaching out to those that fit the criteria accordingly and eventually turns out to be happy employees. But the question always lies on where and how to find them.
Finding the right candidate requires talking to your teams and the hiring managers who let you know the details and an idea of the candidate which lets you create an idea candidate persona. Narrowing down your search with the relevant candidates and finding them on social media platforms while going through your own candidate date base with relevant communities, events, and channels is an ideal step.
Next step would be creating a candidate pools among your passive candidate database, the candidate pools are based on education, experience, skill set, past achievements and other traits that make the candidates closer to the requirements.
Adapt
You should never try to oversell your company or a job for these prospects. A well-drafted first touch point should talk more about the candidate than your company. It should be super personalized with a clear call to action.
Recognizing a relevant prospect is just the first step. Your proactive recruiting does no good if you are unable to attract a candidate’s attention. The first touch point is usually very crucial and helps you begin a brand new relationship with the prospect. It’s always important to remember that they are not yet the candidates, they are just prospects.
It’s about ventures investing in a startup, the venture never initiates it. In the same way, do not try to oversell your job or the company to the prospects. The first touch point should be well drafted, to the point and it should be more about the candidate than the company. As the conversation between a venture and a startup, it’s not about funding, it’s about how well the startup is performing and they would like to know about startups plans. A personalized clear call-to-action is important with these prospects. Open the conversation with whatever suits best to them- calls, meetings or emails.
Foster
Proactive recruiting is fostering your relationship with the candidates. Similar to how a salesperson tries to nurture their relationship with potential customers. Salespersons have a sales cycle, a cycle that’s always dependable on the complexity of the product and other factors, similarly, proactive recruitment has a candidate interest cycle. This cycle depends on the duration and difficulty of filling a position. Junior-level positions are usually easy to fill whereas senior-level a position requires more time to fill leading in a longer interest cycle.
Fostering relations with the candidate during this period of times becomes very important, keeps you as a recruiter in front in future if they are considering a job change.
Keep a good relationship with these candidates and nurture them with content, occasional emails, sharing interesting insights, the recent achievement that strengthens your relationship with candidates.
Attract
The attract stage is when you have found the right people and have transformed them into the right prospects and developed a good relationship with them. Now is the stage to convert these prospects into candidates. The proactive recruitment team uses recruiting tools at this stage to convert the right prospects into candidates at the right time, faster and easier.
Convert
A remarkable candidate experience becomes very essential for any prospects. They gain a much higher awareness of your business and brand and build a relationship with you. No matter what the outcome is it’s important to delight and keep your candidates happy. So in the future, there is always a chance for them to apply or join or even refer their friends.
Keeping candidates in your talent pool is always a good option. You might always need them or their friends later.
Conclusion
Adopting proactive recruitment mythology can make your hires faster and effective. So, next time leave behind the less effective traditional, methods of relying on job boards and career pages, instead construct proactive recruitment where you have engaged potential candidates in your pipeline even before the job position opens. This opinion is also shared by Ray, founder of a proactive recruitment agency in Dallas.