Recruiting Passive Candidates with Excellence: Complete Guide

As of a 2024 report, more than 75% of employers reported they experienced difficulty in filling vacant roles in their organizations. This statistic reveals that there is a noticeable shortage of skills, posing a great challenge for companies to employ the right talent.

Therefore, passive recruiting has now become an integral part of the overall hiring process for almost all companies. It is one of the best strategies that enables your hiring manager to actively reach out to potential candidates, alongside accepting referrals or applications. 

The purpose of recruiting passive candidates is to ensure your talent pool is extensive enough to screen and hire the best. If you prefer to wait for the candidates to approach, it will eventually limit your options, resulting in either a poor hire or a prolonged vacancy. 

So, if you want to adopt passive recruitment for your organization, this guide is all you need to adhere to. Read along till the end to find out! 

Who are the Passive Candidates?

The passive candidates are your potential job seekers who aren’t currently looking for a new role. They are individuals who are currently employed and doing well in their respective fields. At the same time, these candidates are also open to new, productive opportunities if a company reaches out to them with an appealing offer. 

To give you a perspective, around 70% of the global workforce is represented by passive talent. So, if you want to ensure your vacant job roles are filled within the decided timeline and by the right candidate, leveraging the potential of passive recruitment is a must! 

Passive Recruitment

It is an effective hiring strategy that empowers you to acquire top talent by identifying & attracting the potential passive candidates. Upon adopting this process, your hiring team will no longer be waiting just for the candidate applications to come in, but will also be actively approaching the skilled professionals who are currently employed elsewhere. 

Strategic approach, adequate nurturing, and appealing offer can combinedly help support passive recruitment. This method is not just about convincing candidates to leave their current company to join yours, but to make them naturally ready over time to be the right passive talent you seek to hire. 

What are the Benefits of Passive Recruitment?

To help you feel more convinced about recruiting passive candidates, here are some of the benefits that this approach guarantees for your organization:

1. High Quality Hire

In the world of recruitment, passive candidates are considered the most experienced and qualified individuals in their respective domains. As they are already employed in an organization with a successful track record, you won’t have to spend much on training or upskilling them upon hiring, which isn’t the case with active job seekers. In addition to that, passive talents are proven to be more motivated towards making a positive impact on your business workflow. 

2. Quick Time to Hire

Passive recruitment enables you to build a strong talent pool with ideal candidates for a particular role. Therefore, the overall time to hire is significantly reduced! As you won’t be solely waiting for applicants to reach you, your continuous sourcing or engaging efforts with passive candidates will speed up the hiring process. There’s a high chance that your pool of passive talent is already aware of your company and is receptive towards the opportunities you introduce for them. 

3. Better Employer Branding

When you implement a respectful and proactive approach to the pool of passive candidates, it will eventually boost your brand reputation. You will be showcasing your organization as a desirable and forward-thinking place for people to work. Such a positive perception of your company will attract future talent, giving you a combined interest from both active as well as passive job seekers. 

How Can You Source Passive Candidates?

Passive recruiting can’t include the same approach as you have for engaging with active candidates. You can’t simply rely on posting job offers online and wait to sort through the received applications. Instead, your hiring team needs to go out of their way to source passive candidates with adequate skills who aren’t currently looking for jobs, but can consider switching for a better offer. 

Some of the proven techniques for you to source candidates for passive recruitment are:

• Make Use of Social Media

Social media channels aren’t the regular job boards! Therefore, employers tend to leverage the potential of platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter (now X), and others to find and assess potential candidates for a role. For the positions that demand design or creative skills, social media becomes a great channel for employers to review candidates’ work. 

• Leverage the Employee Connections or Referrals

Consider setting up an active employee referral program, which is a faster way to bring in potential passive candidate leads. Employees working in your organization can suggest talented individuals in their network whom you can approach for passive recruitment. In most cases, it is your employees who are aware if their friends are dissatisfied in their current organization and want a change. This way, you will be able to approach such candidates even before they start their hunt for a new job. 

• Use Candidate Sourcing and Recruitment Tools

Prefer using dedicated candidate sourcing and recruitment tools that are tailored to support passive hiring. You don’t just need information retrieved from the resumes of active job seekers, but also learn about the characteristic traits, personality, core skills, and other such attributes in potential candidates. You can use a candidate sourcing software to scour several databases and prepare a list of passive talent. Following that, you can use specific recruitment tools to further assess the candidates based on their skills and personality, and take the hiring process further. 

Best Strategies to Adopt for Passive Recruitment

In order to ace your hiring game with passive recruitment, you ought to follow the right strategies or techniques. Here are some of them for you to adhere to:

1. Broaden Your Search Radius

You can’t solely rely on the accessible databases or the LinkedIn platform for identifying potential profiles of candidates. Some of the talented individuals might not have updated or completed profiles across those channels, making it difficult for you to identify them. In other cases, some candidates who are great with public skills might not be interested in being approached through LinkedIn or other such channels. 

Therefore, it is important to explore all possible options for reaching out to a wider range of potential candidates. You can attend networking events, introduce an employee referral program, leverage automation tools, and try other such means to find great talent. 

2. Build Your Employer Reputation

Try sharing more about your company’s culture and values through social media and other messaging opportunities. Beyond that, organize events that showcase the work culture you praise and implement for your company. Such efforts will entice potential candidates to learn more about your brand, which will boost your overall reputation. 

You can also add a ‘Team’ section to your website, highlighting your current employees, their achievements, and awards. It will give your potential passive candidates an understanding that their work will be appreciated and shared in your company. 

3. Personalized Outreach

The key rule of passive recruiting is crafting compelling and personalized messages for connecting with the ideal candidates. Remember, the passive candidates aren’t actively looking for any job offer, so it is your messaging that will convince them to naturally think about it. You can tailor your personalized outreach by aligning your messaging to the candidates’ interests, career goals, or background. 

The more efforts you make towards making the candidates feel special while communicating with your HR team, the higher the chance will be for them to consider your pitch. 

4. Implement Long-Term Hiring Campaign

For some skilled passive candidates who are worth the wait, you might have to build a long-term hiring campaign. In this approach, you will be nurturing the brand relationship with potential passive candidates and keeping them engaged over time. Upon adopting this initiative, you might have to create valuable content associated with career development, industry insights, and more, and share it with the potential talent. 

Soon, you will be positioning your brand as a thought leader, which will increase the chances of candidates choosing your company as their workplace. Your efforts in this strategy won’t be forceful, as you will be seeking a candidate’s natural change of decision. 

How Can Skill and Personality-Based Assessments Help with Passive Recruitment?

In order to make your passive recruitment more effective, implementing personality and skill-based tests can be of great importance. Here are a few ways in which introducing assessments can help you with passive recruitment:

1. Improve Candidate Experience

Candidate experience is what makes your organization look more appealing to active or inactive job seekers. It is an integral part of your employer branding efforts, which will collectively improve your passive recruiting efficiency. 

With skill and personality assessments, you will be able to gauge the skills of your passive candidates, based on their decision-making and cognitive abilities, and not just based on their education. 

Beyond that, you will also be reducing the level of anxiety such candidates experience when they think of switching from their established current role. Tailored assessments will help encourage equality, inclusivity, and transparency in candidates for your offer. 

3. Reduce the Rate of False Hires

Even with the best candidate sourcing efforts, there is a chance that the passive talent you thought was a right fit might not turn out as expected. Considering that scenario, you cannot afford to pitch your job opportunity to a passive candidate, convince them to join your company, and then realize he/she isn’t the right fit for the role. 

It will not just waste your recruitment time & efforts, but will also adversely affect your brand reputation. Therefore, it is better to introduce assessments beforehand and encourage potential passive candidates to take them up early, when you are in the communication stage. 

With such data-driven and result-based evaluations, you will have a clear picture of what your passive candidate is capable of. Once you are sure that the person is the right fit, meeting all your expectations, you can implement ideal strategies to pitch your job offer. 

How Can Ducknowl Help You with Recruiting Passive Candidates?

At Ducknowl, we have a comprehensive suite of skill-based and personality assessments, ready for you to implement alongside your passive recruitment efforts. We have tailored tests for you to assess the skills across different domains, including IT, coding, computer literacy, language, accounting, and more. 

Alongside that, we also offer personality-based assessments that will help you determine the behavioral styles and workplace preferences. The results of such tests will help you determine if your passive candidate is the perfect fit for you to pitch your passive hiring strategy. 

Beyond that, to help you speed up your overall hiring process, Ducknowl also offers technology-backed recruitment tools that can help you with resume screening, scheduling one-way interviews, creating a video job description, and more. 

No matter what your requirements are, if you want to foster smart hiring with your passive recruitment strategy, request a demo of our tools today! 

Conclusion

Finding the right talent to join your team is more difficult than ever in this decade! However, passive recruitment is a proven strategy to bring in top-performing individuals to be part of your competitive business landscape. Use this approach alongside your usual recruitment practices, and eventually, you will have a strong talent pipeline to meet your company’s hiring needs.