From emphasizing your business culture to avoiding wasted time, here are six answers to the question, “What are best practices for outbound recruiting?”
- Sell Your Organization’s Brand
- Diversify Your Talent-Sourcing Tools and Resources
- Stand Out With a Recruiting Video
- Target Talent in Online Communities
- Stick With What You Know and Grow Your Expertise
- Keep Your Outreach Simple
Sell Your Organization’s Brand
Promote and sell the employer brand as much as possible during the recruitment process. This involves not only talking about the features of your organization but also emphasizing its culture, professional development opportunities, and what makes it different from others out there.
Doing so helps attendees form an opinion about the company, rather than just hearing dry facts about positions. Candidates are more likely to be motivated by working for a company if they feel a sense of connection with it—making clear why your organization is a great fit for them really helps to accomplish this goal.
Diversify Your Talent-Sourcing Tools and Resources
Sourcing for and reaching out to talent requires dynamic social skills that allow you to build solid, diverse, and effective networks with the right people. As a recruiter, this requires going beyond LinkedIn, and the usual simple Twitter, Facebook (Meta), or Twitter searches, to identify and zero in on passive candidates that are most likely to convert.
I have mentored many recruiters, and being a recruiter myself, a big mistake we make is getting stuck in old ways and being slow to pick up new strategies, tools, and resources that can enhance talent sourcing.
Aside from LinkedIn and the usual search platforms, any serious recruiter will consider niche platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow for tech talents. Instead of casting your net wide, hoping to catch many fish, niche platforms allow you to narrow your search to the most high-potential talent.
Stand Out With a Recruiting Video
If you’re a recruiter, you’ve probably noticed just how difficult it can be to get the attention of the hottest candidates. They get bombarded with opportunities like yours every week (or day). So how do you stand out above the noise? Video. There are two approaches to using video in your outreach.
The first is using a personalized approach. You can do this using a tool such as bombbomb.com, where you can introduce yourself and the opportunity for your candidate in just a few seconds.
Don’t have time to create hundreds of personalized videos? You can also try a video of the hiring manager explaining the role and answering various questions about their workplace.
This is impactful because it shows the person who your candidate would work with right away instead of later on. In-demand candidates don’t want to be strung along, only to find out they have zero chemistry with the person who’s hiring them.
Target Talent in Online Communities
No matter what niche you’re in, there’s a community around it full of highly skilled professionals interested in that niche. If you’re looking for specific talent, joining these communities and reaching out directly to people in them is a fantastic way of finding talent that might not be actively looking for a new opportunity.
Many people join these communities out of sheer love for the niche or industry. Focusing your recruiting efforts on the places they usually gather can bring you more success than the endless search on LinkedIn, which doesn’t guarantee that targeted talent has experience or interest in joining your organization.
You can find these industry-specific communities on Facebook, Reddit, and even various forums all over the internet. Invest in excellent candidate experience, though. Highly talented people don’t want to waste their time on sub-par recruiting processes and want a seamless experience in showcasing their skills.
Stick With What You Know and Grow Your Expertise
A tip that I share with new recruiters is to immerse yourself in one—and only one—industry. The best case is to recruit in an industry you had prior work experience. Too many recruiters make the mistake of trying to follow the money. When they sense their industry slowing down, they jump to a new niche.
That’s the kiss of death. The reason being, by leaving an industry you know, and have a passion for, for a new sector that’s hotter in hiring may seem smart. But, by the time you get up to speed with new terminology and the landscape of a new niche, you’re too late.
You will compete against other recruiters who intimately know that niche. And, finally, companies using third-party recruiters can detect a recruiter that does not understand their business. The example I give in my classes is, don’t hire a plumber when your cable TV goes out. Be the expert—good times and bad.
Keep Your Outreach Simple
How to find people and how to approach them. Finding candidates can be difficult in almost any industry. For the same reasons people go to a doctor for medical help and a lawyer for legal help, most top companies use at least one staffing/talent agency. These companies specialize in finding the best candidates across any industry and position.
Simple outreach is crucial. Candidates are going to want to know how much the job pays, why this position is better than their current one, and what’s special about your company. Developing these three things into a brief message will allow candidates to understand what you are offering accurately and will help avoid either party from wasting time during the discovery phase.
