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With a skills shortage plaguing the job landscape in the Nordic countries, recruiting passive candidates has become imperative. However, you will need to understand how to recruit passive candidates to ensure quality hires, failing which your time and effort will go to waste.
With their high employment rates (compared to the EU average), good working conditions, and work-life balance, the Nordic countries offer stable employment to a sizable section of their people. This means those securely employed rarely look for a job change actively and are hard to find on job boards and online CV platforms.
Not sure how to recruit a passive candidate? We bring you three effective strategies that can help.
Effective Passive Candidate Recruiting Strategies
1. Understand Your Candidates Better
Don’t be driven by any preconceived notions when contacting your shortlisted passive candidates. For instance, imagine thinking a passive candidate prefers to have a short commute or excellent benefits and offering a role with the same. But the candidate says he/she is happy with a hybrid work model and the overall benefits on offer at his/her present company before clearly deriding your presumptuous thoughts and disconnecting the call. That would be a catastrophe for sure, won’t it?
To avoid such incidents and ruining your chances of bringing a passive candidate on board, take time to know about their present roles, relevant qualifications and experiences, and review their backgrounds to understand their strengths and how the open role aligns.
Take note of their special interests and any key accomplishments or accolades listed in their profile or bio, especially if you believe they can be of use in the present role. Foreseeing the impact the candidates will have on your company is equally vital before reaching out to them.
2. Leverage LinkedIn
Passive candidates prefer networking with their peers and industry leaders on LinkedIn. Even when they aren’t actively searching for a change, they could be posting, commenting, and participating in forums or discussions to engage with others in their industry. Your key is to reach the right candidates with customised messaging to connect online.
Your online persona on LinkedIn needs to be reliable and personable, starting with a rock-solid LinkedIn profile. This breeds trust in the candidates who may otherwise block you right away. When focusing on “how to recruit passive candidates on LinkedIn?” a key mistake is to send them boilerplate job descriptions right off the bat and spamming them with frequent messages when they don’t answer.
To get the candidates excited about your open position, you need to understand what their priorities and needs are. At the same time, your communication with them should focus on why you believe they stand out for a particular role in the first place and what impact they could have in that role.
Keeping your targeted candidates warm and engaged with personalised, clear, and quick communication is equally necessary to nurture the relationship. This can improve the chances of your job offer being accepted.
3. Depend on Employee Referrals
Your present employees can help you connect with candidates who are fit for an open role but aren’t looking for a job switch. Since your employees know the company culture pretty well, they can act as your ambassadors and help with potential referrals from their professional networks.
You can give your employees incentives to refer suitable candidates, who get hired eventually. This could include referral bonuses, referral points that can be redeemed for monetary or non-monetary benefits, employee recognition, gift cards, etc.
Studies have found that candidates referred by other employees are likely to perform better in their new roles and last at the company for a longer period than those recruited via other methods like career sites and job boards. Since accepting employee referrals boosts the level of trust and employee-company relationships, it helps in your company branding, which indirectly improves your chances of a favourable reaction when contacting passive candidates.
Final Words
Understanding your candidates better, leveraging LinkedIn, and making the most of employee referrals are among the most effective passive candidate recruiting strategies. Getting the timing right and using technology to stand out from the crowd when recruiting passive candidates are equally vital. For example, you can use video emails or a link to your Calendly to schedule a quick call to make it easy for your passive candidates to know more and get interested in the open role.
If you need help with recruiting passive candidates in the Nordic countries, don’t hesitate to reach us at InHunt World!
This article was written by InHunt World