It’s likely that you are not doing the number one thing that all recruiters should be doing!
Re-engaging with existing candidates is the most important thing recruiters can do to get maximum value from the talent they’ve already sourced, screened, categorized, and interviewed. Yet most are not doing so, at great cost to their organizations.
Think about what happens when you are actively recruiting for a position. You meet the candidates, interview them, and learn all about them. All this takes significant time, effort, and resources. But what happens if they don’t end up getting hired? In most cases, their profile sits idly in the database and is rarely re-visited. This is counterintuitive – you’d think that when recruiting for another job, the company’s existing database would be the logical place to look for the next hire, but in practice, only 1 in 3 HR managers revisit past candidates when recruiting for a new position.
Here are the top 5 reasons that you absolutely should be dipping into your existing database to source your next hire:
1.Increase your chances of success
Although LinkedIn and other platforms are tempting due to the access they grant to an almost infinite pool of potential candidates, having access to so many people you don’t know or have any relationship with is actually not that useful. Candidates are much less likely to respond to a LinkedIn solicitation than one coming from a recruiter they know and have worked with before, which is why research by Bullhorn shows that regularly re-engaging with your database increases the likelihood of placement by approximately 76%. The average recruiter spends around twenty minutes performing research before they are even ready to approach a candidate, and after all that effort, only 1 in 20 LinkedIn solicitations ever receive a reply.
2. Keep your costs down
According to new benchmarking data from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost per hire is nearly $4,700. This includes the cost of sourcing, meeting, interviewing, and vetting each potential candidate. One of the fastest ways to reduce the cost per hire is to re-engage applicants you’ve already sourced. Just think about it – you already have their resume, references, and interview feedback on file. You don’t need to scout, post a role on job boards, go to trade shows or perform other expensive recruitment practices. You don’t need to go through that lengthy “talent mapping” process from scratch. And if you’ve been doing your job and regularly keeping tabs on developments in your candidates’ careers (more about that in point 5), you’ll already have a good idea about whether they are open to offers and of what kind.
3. Beat the competition
More than 90% of recruiters use social media to try and track down their next hire. Online recruitment and social media platforms have leveled the playing field for every employer seeking candidates. By turning to these general platforms, however, you are effectively fishing in an overfished pond with too many fishermen and not enough fish. As a recruiter, it is notoriously difficult to make successful hires when there is so much competition. As a candidate, every online recruiter looks the same; they have no reason to respond to one recruiter over another and often ignore all approaches. The candidates in your database already know you, giving you an edge over competitors.
4. Make use of ALL your talent
In the recruitment game, it’s easy to think of the winners and forget about the “silver medalists” – those that didn’t quite make it. Many recruiters and agencies do not maintain relationships with silver medalist candidates or contact them again when future vacancies come up. When you consider the time, effort, and money you have already invested in these candidates — not to mention the relationships that have been carefully built up — you begin to appreciate what a huge waste of money and resources it is to ignore this large and fertile group.
5. Keep connections alive
The most successful recruiters are experts at relationships. Recruiters could do well to learn a lesson from the staffing agencies of old. These businesses understood that they were in direct competition with other agencies and that their greatest asset and competitive advantage would come from their candidates. As such, they spent a lot of time nurturing relationships. They kept in touch with candidates that were hired as well as those that were not and would keep tabs on things like whether their candidates had left town, moved jobs, or were seeking new opportunities.
Successful recruitment in the future will be relationship-based. Recruiters who want to remain viable must work very hard to maintain long-term connections. As a recruiting agency, the more relationships you build with quality candidates, the higher the value of your organization – companies will always want to work with agencies they know are able to attract the top talent.
What’s next?
You know that keeping in touch with your existing database is important and will help you work more efficiently, get better results and drive down your costs. But keeping tabs on so many people is hard, so how do you do it? In this age of digital transformation, it doesn’t make sense to go it alone. An AI-based HR solution like Woo makes it easy, fast, and inexpensive to use your existing database to the maximum and get the most out of every drop of talent you’ve ever had contact with.
