Top Proactive Recruitment Strategies

Today’s job market is HOT! As an employer, how can you attract the right talent and build your bench?

The answer? Proactive recruitment.

Let’s talk about proactive recruiting – what is it and what are some strategies your business can implement to do it well?

Table of Contents

What is Proactive Recruitment?

Proactive recruitment is exactly what it sounds like. If you’ve visited the Culture Works site or have been in the human resources space for long enough, chances are you’ve heard of it.

According to Ideal, proactive recruitment is “the process of identifying and engaging with candidates long before a position comes open.” This means they’re not actually “candidates” at that point. “Rather, they’re people with skill sets in a given geographic area and job role, and you build relationships with them.”

Proactive recruitment is a practical tool to utilize, and with remote work being more popular than ever, proactive recruitment has become even more tangible in the workforce.

Top Proactive Recruitment Strategies

As we wrote in our article on proactive recruiting to build a killer bench, most companies today practice a reactive recruitment approach. Reactive recruiting means not posting about your business or job until a position needs to be filled.

Proactive recruitment searches for the right people before you need them and is a much more effective method. In fact, at Culture Works we believe building a killer bench can take six months to a year.

Here are our top proactive recruitment strategies.

Begin the Search

When it comes to proactive recruitment, the first thing to do is look for and reach out to prospective candidates.

Remember, you don’t want to be reaching out to just anyone. Ask yourself, what kind of person will be a long-term, engaged candidate with an interest in becoming an employee at my business?

This requires narrowing down your search and getting down to the nitty-gritty of who you want to hire in the first place. Consider partnering with your team to create an ‘ideal candidate profile’ for each future role that might need to be filled.

Find candidates by using:

Social platforms
Your candidate database
Social or networking events
Relevant communities and/or groups

Engage Prospects

When it comes to engaging prospective candidates, personalization is key. After deciding who your ideal candidate is, you must pique their interest.

Although you might have found someone or a group of prospects, hiring is a two-way street. Remember, they aren’t the candidate yet.

Engage prospective candidates by sending them a personalized message. You can:

Tell them about yourself
Tell them about your business
Ask them what they’re looking for in a job

Nurture Relationships

In sales, lead nurturing is “the process of developing and maintaining relationships with customers at every stage of their journey, usually through marketing and communications messaging.”

Similarly, in this phase of proactive recruitment, you need to develop and maintain relationships with prospective candidates.

Let the stats speak for themselves. According to Finances Online, 63% of candidates find employer communication inadequate during the recruiting process. Let this statistic encourage you to nurture relationships with prospective candidates.

Nurturing these relationships helps keep prospective candidates interested, and likely, with proper nurturing, your business will be top of mind if they begin to seek out a job.

Nurturing might look like keeping in touch through:

Social media marketing
Ongoing content strategy
Emails

Convert Prospects into Applicants (Then Employees!)

At this point in your proactive recruitment strategy, you’ve laid a solid foundation for prospective candidates and future hires.

When a job now opens up, chances are the individuals in this funnel will be encouraged to apply. After you receive their application, however, it’s up to you to make sure the experience with your business exceeds their expectations.

Josh Tolan, Spark Hire’s CEO and Founder says, “In a competitive market, the ability to move candidates through the process quickly can be the difference between making the hire and not.

Efficiency, communication, and understanding are especially key in the world of remote work. If you don’t have a team designated to streamline your hiring processes, consider implementing recruiting software to stay on top of things.

A Final Word

Surely, the tips listed above are not all you can do to maximize your proactive recruitment strategy. Read on to learn more about how your business can attract the right talent and proactive recruitment. And, happy hiring!