Automating candidate outreach saves tremendous time and drives diversity.
By Korneel Bouman, Chief Customer Officer, Fetcher
At Fetcher, we do the heavy lifting in helping you find and connect with the best talent so that you can spend your time on the more valuable aspects of hiring — like building relationships with top talent, and successfully onboarding these candidates into your organization.
In the past year, we have launched several automation features to help make the recruiting process even faster and easier and wanted to take a moment to highlight why automating your candidate outreach process is proving to be the most effective step in: 1) saving time and decreasing your speed to hire, and 2) combating unconscious bias to hire more diverse candidates.
Watch our FetcherEd video and read more below:
Saving Time and Decreasing your Speed to Hire
We’d all like to have unlimited hours in the day, and to get to all of the things piling up on our to-do lists. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. The good thing is, you already took a step in the right direction by having Fetcher discover and connect you with top talent… but we can do even better. We can save you a significant amount of time by fully automating your outreach and follow up process.
Let me illustrate what this means with real data (presuming you’re already using Fetcher to unearth candidates):
Assume you want to research 100 potential candidates. Between reviewing their profiles on Fetcher, scanning their professional and social networking profiles, and researching whatever else you might want to explore, this effort may take you 5+ minutes per candidate. That’s a total of 500 minutes, or roughly 8.5 hours, just in researching, but you haven’t talked to a single person yet!
Now compare that amount of effort to the automated outreach scenario: you’ve calibrated your search with Fetcher and you’re feeling good that we know what you’re looking for. Maybe not every candidate is a perfect 10 (although, more on that below), but the majority of the candidates meet the key criteria you laid out for the role. Now, imagine everyone we’ve discovered for you automatically receives a personalized email from you as well as two thoughtful follow-ups. Now all you have to do is respond to people that replied and want to talk to you.
We recommend an initial conversation of about 15 minutes with people that are interested. This should give you enough time to assess whether someone could be a good fit, and learn more about them and why they want to talk to you. Say that you end up talking to 10 people out of the 100 we submitted (representing a conservative 20% response rate, of whom half say they’re interested in talking to you). This process will cost you 150 minutes, or 2.5 hours, and you’ll have interviewed 10 qualified candidates!
That’s 10 potential hires, with access to their 10 potential networks. Even if someone turns out not to be a fit, you’ve forged a connection that may benefit your organization in the future. Meanwhile, you will have great people in your pipeline, which will help you fill your open role more quickly.
“Now what if someone replies they want to talk, and they really don’t seem to be a good fit?” you might ask yourself, which brings me to my second point: the power of the non-obvious candidates.
Combating Unconscious Bias to Unearth the Non-Obvious Candidate
There is ample evidence that diverse teams outperform, and you’d be surprised at the level of (unconscious) bias each and every one of us carries around. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of “we must find the perfect candidate” which might reinforce the predominant point of view in your organization.
I’ve learned from experience to keep an open mind and now have adopted the rule that I will speak to anyone that Fetcher finds (we use our own tool to hire for our teams) who wants to talk to me. I can point to two great hires that I would have never made if I had based my decision whether or not to talk to them on strict adherence to the JD and role requirements — I’d have filtered them out. As it stands, they blew me away in the interview and went on to do great things.
By properly calibrating a role on the front end of the process and then pulling yourself out of the selection process, you check your biases at the door and open up the possibilities for finding that unlikely, needle-in-the-haystack candidate who might just be an amazing fit.
Parting Thoughts
Automating the process of candidate outreach will help you build a more diverse pipeline in a fraction of the time, and will help you find great people you might have otherwise overlooked. So… If you haven’t yet considered automating outreach, give it a try or talk to your Customer Success Manager to help you set this up.
Once you’ve filled the role, please let us know so we can celebrate with you and your team. We send our clients freshly baked cookies every time they get to a hire. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of finding an amazing person for your team, and we look forward to celebrating with you.
Happy Fetching!
