Look, it’s no secret that hiring qualified candidates is historically competitive, and I’m not going to bore you with a ton of details on “The Great Resignation,” or “The Great Reshuffle,” or whatever it is we’re calling the seismic shifts sweeping the global talent marketplace.
There used to be a clear distinction between “passive” and “active” candidates, at least in the sort of semantic debate about abstract theories (see: employer branding, candidate experience) that always seems to dominate the recruiting conversation. Passive candidates were, inherently, more desirable than active applicants - there was a time, not too long ago, where simply looking for a new job (or even worse, being “in transition”) was considered something of a red flag, irrespective of qualifications or job fit.
For the myriad metaphors around “recruiting is like dating” out there, perhaps the most fitting (if slightly aphoristic) is that only hiring passive candidates is a lot like only dating married people. It doesn’t make a ton of sense, but there’s always been this prevailing theory that the only candidates who are actually looking for a job aren’t as desirable as talent that’s not even ostensibly on the market.
Times have changed. Hiring really hasn’t. This makes for the perfect storm that we’re now seeing.
When I'm Gone: All Candidates Are Active Candidates
The fact of the matter is that with 3 in 5 workers currently looking or planning to look for a new job in the next year, and nearly 40% considering finding a “new career path or direction,” it’s clear that the always tenuous line between passive and active talent is not only anachronistic, but impractical. Today, it’s safe to say that the significant majority of all talent out there are, to some degree, “active candidates.”
This begs the fundamental question, of course, as to why there are still so many individual recruiters and employers out there pursuing, for all intents and purposes, a passive talent acquisition strategy (insert punchline). Because in truth, hiring success is inextricably linked with outbound recruiting success. This I learned only recently - and I’m glad to see Occam’s Razor is finally making a comeback in recruiting and hiring (big data be damned).
As the theorem states, the simplest solution, in recruiting and in life, is almost always the correct one. And outbound recruiting, it turns out, is as simple as it gets. I admit, I had a bit of a hard time writing this post. That’s because when hireEZ (formerly known as Hiretual) announced that it was working to create a category called “outbound recruiting,” and once the concept was thoroughly explained to me and my questions answered, “outbound recruiting” sounded a lot like, well, “recruiting.”
What they refer to inbound recruiting, sadly, is the mean to which most of us have mainly regressed, the spray and pray of the old days evolving to cut and paste InMails, which, I’ll admit it, are often unintentionally hilarious. I mean, I have agency recruiters try to place candidates with me all the time, or, even funnier, people who think I’m actually an HR leader. Well, they don’t really think that. I’ve just got the right keywords and the wrong connections.
The promise of AI sounds a lot like the core responsibilities recruitment coordinator, and, with apologies to the lovely people who have supported me with scheduling interviews or putting together offer letter and onboarding paperwork, there’s really no reason these functions still function largely manually. And, even if it takes hearing about “AI” all the time, that’s a worthwhile tradeoff for the automation of back office processes that’s decades overdue in recruiting and hiring.
Sure, your ATS may suck, or your process might be a pain. Those are all part of life when you’re a recruiter. So do rejected offers, crappy hiring managers, or getting ghosted by a new hire on the first day, and having to reopen the req, and then having to do that another 5 times (it happened to me).
Recruiting - real recruiting - isn’t hard. In fact, I’d argue that it requires the type of talent that most organizations seem to shun: someone who doesn’t really fit into any role but is smart enough to do most of them, and whose primary qualifications rely on their learning agility and their emotional intelligence. '
But it does take time.
It Takes Two: Making Relationship Capital Pay Off
Building long term, meaningful relationships - the kind that not only create a hire here and there, but also a ton of business and referrals down the line as they become hiring managers and buyers - that takes time. It’s not like filling a req, “putting a butt in a seat” in industry parlance. It’s not like sourcing, which, let’s face it, really isn’t that hard - tell most teenagers that finding people on the internet is a full time job, and they probably wouldn’t believe you.
In fact, it’s become a little too easy - candidates are a commodity, digital footprints have become expansive, and everyone with a halfway viable profile (or even one that barely passes muster, from experience) gets bombarded by recruiters they don’t know, pitching jobs they’re not a fit for, on platforms that literally every other recruiter utilizes as their sole source of “passive” recruiting, using databases that every other employer pays to access and placing job ads and employer brand collateral on the exact same network as every other employer out there.
Relationship capital is the ultimate competitive advantage in talent acquisition, and that means when the other guys zig, you gotta zag. And when everyone out there is talking about how there’s no talent available on the market today, or they just can’t get through to the few qualified candidates they find, differentiation has become the only strategy that works.
Now, it’s impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive, for recruiters to differentiate their companies and job openings at scale. Yeah, everyone sees the same targeted display ads and sponsored posts - only they’re paying fractions of a cent more than you to get in front of the same “passive” job seeker who’s statistically never, ever going to actually go from branded ad to application. I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s the same reason I’m not saying aliens don’t exist, either. There’s always a chance, I guess. But the odds don’t look too good.
The good news is that most recruiters are either too lazy, or else are too busy looking at the forest to see the trees, talking about stuff like “quality of hire” when we don’t even know where our applicants are coming from, or in most cases, how much they cost. We just know they were probably really expensive, because that’s what happens when you wait until the last minute before making a purchase - you’re going to pay a premium.
And most recruiters are always reactive, and work for employers’ whose ostensible workforce planning strategy is just in time, all the time. This is why sourcing and candidate development has somehow devolved into what can only be described as “inbound recruiting.” That is, all the parts of recruiting that aren’t actually recruiting.
Ain't That Peculiar: Just Make the Damn Hire.
If you’re in this business, this may sound like a hot take, but it’s the truth: You’re there to make hires.
It’s literally your only job. You’re not a marketer. You’re not a brand storyteller. You’re not some internet genius, even if you can build a pretty mean Boolean string. You are a recruiter. And what recruiters do is - or should do - is pretty much the entire “outbound recruiting” category hireEZ has launched: Make the hire by making human connections.
It’s really not that hard of a concept - and yet, automation often takes precedence over personalization, and high tech over high touch, when in reality, successful talent acquisition organizations know that it’s not an “or,” it’s a “both.” But mainly, the best recruiters already have a system pretty well figured out that’s got nothing to do with the system they’re using. Mindsets tend to be technologically agnostic like that.
We can sit here and argue semantics all day. Hell, I’ve wasted the best years of my life arguing about the various complexities and constructs which seem to make it so difficult to find “talent” (which, let’s face it, has none in like, 99% of hiring events).
Ultimately, the key to making that hire has nothing to do with tools, or technology, or process, or policies. It lies in the willingness of the recruiter, now that we’ve largely automated most of the backoffice BS and coordinator crap, to spend the time building relationships and referral networks instead of pipeline and “talent communities.”
hireEZ gets it, and that’s why this “new” category is really nothing new at all. It’s fundamental talent acquisition, where relationships are more important than requisitions, where people aren’t part of a hiring process, but instead, a part of your professional network.
You don’t need to build a pipeline through inbound recruiting when trust is so much more effective in transforming passive talent into active candidates -and, ultimately, hires.
The secret in recruiting, like most of life, is really not all that secret: it all comes down to who you know. And no one knows that recruiter who’s content simply sending InMails and searching job board databases all day as anything other than a nuisance at best, a scammer at worst, and a discredit to those of us in this profession who believe that human capital is predicated on relationship capital, first.
Inbound recruiters aren’t recruiters - they’re just waiting to be backfilled by algorithms, who can help facilitate the process, but will never actually know the thrill of finding a candidate the hard way, developing them over the long term, and then finally, getting that offer accepted. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.
Granted, hireEZ Chief Marketing Officer Shannon Pritchett, who, full disclosure, is also one of my close friends and a total badass, was clear in establishing that the new paradigm they’re pushing is nothing new. In fact, a lot of it is decidedly old school - and coming from a talent technology startup, that’s decidedly refreshing.
And one that’s probably long overdue, too. For recruiters - and I mean real recruiters - it’s a good time in that most candidates are on the market. Further, many skilled candidates and employers are no longer bound by the tight geographical restrictions or cost of living adjustments when attracting top talent today.
Taking advantage of that opportunity means adopting the mindset of an “outbound recruiter,” which is to say, not just another glorified spammer or order taker. A talent acquisition professional can spot the type of talent that’s right for their culture, even if it’s not right now, and knows that “opportunity” is more than a recruiting buzzword. It’s all in the timing, kid - and that part’s an art, not a science. Even though it’s way late, I’m acting under the assumption that this is a promotional post, but even if it weren’t, I’d be all about anything that helped build the brand equity and collective reputation of the recruiting profession.
It's the Same Old Song: Why The Future of Recruiting Is (Still) Outbound
The fact is, outbound recruiting is one of the rarest and most in demand skillsets on the market, and we owe it to ourselves, our candidates and our employers to put in the effort required not just to find talent other companies can’t (or are simply too lazy to reach out to in any meaningful manner), but to make sure that talent thinks about our companies as a potential fit long before their role ever gets posted on a job board or served up on a “social network.”
The reason inbound recruiting doesn’t work is that people don’t trust recruiters, as a rule - even the ones with the sleekest and sexiest technology or tools helping do most of the heavy lifting. Those recruiters who “fish where the fish are” will never get many bites at all. Those who go hunting, on the other hand, rarely go hungry.
The recruiters take the time to A/B test a subject line, personalize a message based on some shared characteristic or commonality (even if it can be easily Googled), or, most importantly, look at their candidates not as resumes sitting in a database, but as professional colleagues and connections, first, well, those are the same ones who are going to win in any market.
Remember, there’s no such thing as a passive candidate if you’re a good enough recruiter. Finding people is easy. Connecting with them is hard. Building trust is nearly impossible. Fortunately, that’s where “outbound recruiting” comes in.
And for that, I’m more than happy to help hireEZ achieve their new brand promise - because outbound recruiting is more than another buzzword or cloying corporate cliche. It’s the only type of recruiting, really, that works. For real.
