Industry Research: Best Practices for Successful Outbound Recruiting

By now, you should have heard the buzz surrounding outbound recruiting.

In short, outbound recruiting represents a proactive approach to recruitment that empowers talent professionals to connect organizations with their most valuable asset: people. 

With the concept established, let’s get to the burning question — how is it done? 

To make this “outbound recruiting how-to” as simple as possible (and keep proactivity top-of-mind), we came up with an easy-to-remember acronym: A.C.T.I.V.E. 

It stands for… 
 

• Assess Your Needs
• Consider The Market
• Target Talent
• Individualize Engagement
• Value the Experience
• Evaluate Progress and Share Success

Ready to become a pro at A.C.T.I.V.E.? Let’s get started. 

Assess Your Needs 

This step is not just about determining your needs for open roles. It’s also about considering the resources available to your team, the larger goals of your organization, and the viability of existing processes to make hires. 
 

Here’s one key area to consider when assessing your needs: 

Organizational Assessment: Make sure to have a conversation with organizational leaders to understand how new hires should be impacting the organization. 

For instance, many organizations are making a more significant effort to address and close diversity gaps. If that’s the case at your organization, talent teams should work with HR and organizational leaders to understand where those gaps exist and how recruiters can do their part by finding talent to close them.

Consider The Market

It’s one thing to establish personas for open roles and hope that there’s talent in the market that fits them. It’s another to have complete visibility into the talent market to see how those personas align with those available.  

Take the time to understand what the talent market looks like based on your open job criteria, since this might inform necessary tweaks that will make a major difference in the size of your available talent pool. 

One area to consider is remote roles. 

Try different locations during research to see where the most talent exists for your industry, skill sets, and beyond. 

Target Talent

At the start of 2021, building a list of qualified talent via sourcing took 60% of talent professionals over 10 hours each week. That time could be much better utilized in improving the candidate experience, crafting personalized engagement, and more. 

The solution to cutting down the time it takes to find qualified talent is investing in a tool that’s proven itself to do just that. 

This tool needs to exponentially expand your available talent pool to give you the best chance at finding the most qualified talent. In short, long gone are the days of searching on just one platform, like LinkedIn. 

Here is one example of how teams can utilize hireEZ’s EZ Sourcing with over 750M+ candidates across 45+ platforms. 

Diversity Searches

If you’re looking for talent and hoping that they both qualify and contribute to organizational diversity, you have the wrong approach. 

As you look for qualified talent, it’s important to have search capabilities that highlight the talent you need to address diversity gaps and strengthen a culture of inclusion. 

These capabilities include: 
 

• Underrepresented search filters
• Blind sourcing 
• Keywords that go beyond underrepresented ethnic minorities and target those with neurodiverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ affiliation, etc… 

Individualize Engagement

Successful candidate engagement is about identifying what’s important to talent and using that as the building block to meet their needs and build a relationship. 

In an evolving world of digitization, there are more ways to reach talent than ever before. hireEZ provides those other avenues with an industry-leading contact information finder, including social media profiles, work/personal emails, and phone numbers. Find out how a candidate prefers to communicate and speak to them where other companies are not. 

On the topic of looking where other companies are not, try to think of different ways to proactively reach talent. 

This might include: 
 

• Reaching out to university alumni groups or college career centers to find fresh/Gen Z talent entering the workforce
• Find community groups that you can message and collaborate with (Veteran hiring groups, etc…)

Value the Experience

In a candidate-driven market, the candidate experience is more crucial than ever before. What many fail to realize is that the experience should do more than seamlessly transition candidates from one stage of the recruitment process to the next. It should also be a reflection of your company’s culture and willingness to meet a candidate’s needs for successful employment. 

Here are some areas to consider when strengthening your candidate experience: 

Internal Team Communication: When we surveyed over 600 talent professionals in December 2021, internal communication ranked as the second biggest obstacle to an effective candidate experience. To prevent these disruptions, teams should have a centralized location for: 
 

• Candidate notes where information about a candidate can be easily accessible and organized
• Clear communication channels beyond email for expedited discourse (i.e. Slack, Microsoft Teams) 

It’s important to establish communication expectations so the entire team knows how to communicate efficiently and keep track of information that’s needed to assess and secure talent in your pipeline. 

External Communication with Talent: Similar to internal communication, clear conversations and expectations should be set with candidates. 69% of candidates want employer response time improved, and part of this is attributed to talent teams not being upfront about the length of time a process will take. 

With that in mind, keep candidates looped into the process and updated as to when they should expect responses. 

For instance, as a candidate makes it through each round of an interview, ask them: 
 

• How they’re doing
• If their expectations are being met 
• If there’s any way you can help them

You don’t want to lose a good candidate that’s already making their way through your pipeline just because you didn’t check in on them. 

Evaluate Progress and Share Success

For each step of the process above, analytics needs to be available to see how you and the team are performing. 

With hireEZ, these metrics are automatically available to be shared with your team, including 
 

• How many candidates team members are uncovering, qualifying, and contacting
• How quickly talent is moving through stages of the talent pipeline
• What the response rates look like for each individual team member 

Not only will this make it easier to track progress and remain motivated by each other’s success, but it will let your team leaders know that your outbound recruitment efforts are garnering results. 

Kunwar Ishan Sharma is a Senior Content Writer in charge of content creation across hireEZ, including external articles, blogs, webinar content, video scripts, and eBooks. Visit https://hireez.com/