Sourcing in the Moment

How many missed opportunities to pounce on passive talent have slipped past your team because you couldn’t seize the moment?

Tell me if this has ever happened to you:

You meet someone amazing on a plane. You get into a great conversation about what you both do, and you realize this person would be the perfect addition to your team. They have energy, they have the passion, and since they’re randomly sitting next to you in the time vacuum that is commercial flight, you’re experiencing the relaxed, unfiltered real them — and they are AWESOME. Plus, they seem open to something new!

You exchange LinkedIn invites, promise to be in touch, deplane …

…and then you never speak again. Ever.

Faster than your Uber arrives, your real life starts happening again, and both you and your potential new work Unicorn are too busy and too distracted to retain a connection.

Maybe this has only happened to you once or twice, but extrapolate that across your organization. How many missed opportunities to pounce on passive talent have slipped past your team because you couldn’t seize the moment?

Don’t let this sourcing tragedy happen again.

You already have just about everything you need to make real connections, that really last past baggage claim—or past the line at Starbucks, or past all the other IRL interactions that you and your employees get lucky (or network hard) enough to stumble into.

Here’s what you’ve got going for you, and how to put ’em to work:

You already have the best recruiters.

Plenty of statistics back what we instinctively know —that the people on your team (and your extended ecosystem) are your best recruiters.

According to Edelman Insights, employees rank as the most trusted influencers when communicating about their company’s engagement and integrity.

Your employee advocates — even your freelance partners — already live your employment value prop, and they aren’t shy about sharing their experiences. They’re happy to detail the reasons they love their work across their social networks (especially when you reward them for it), and they’ve got natural megaphones to amplify their experiences: According to Cisco, employees have 10 times more followers than their corporate social media accounts. Adding fresh flame to that fiery following? Only 2–8% of employee social networks overlap with brand networks.

The economics of employee advocacy work, too. On average, an employee advocacy program involving 1,000 active participants can generate $1,900,000 in advertising value, based on an Employee Advocacy Study at Kredible.

More bang for less bucks? WOM, FTW.

You already have what they want to work on, and the people they want to work with.

The biggest generation in the workforce (that would be the Millenials, my Gen X friends) has made it clear that they’re all in for company culture and long-shot opportunity. Collegefeed found that nearly 80% of Millennials look first for people and culture fit with employers, followed closely by career potential.

Millennials want to work on amazing stuff, with talented people.

Not coincidentally, they’re introduced to many of those opportunities through the networks of people that they respect. According to the same study by Collegefeed, around 70% of Millennials say they hear about companies through friends and job boards.

If you’re still unsure that your opportunities (even in the unsexy roles) and advocacy from your current talent base will provide exponential hiring value, just follow the money: A data company called Paysa uses a complex algorithm to track talent migration in the tech industry, and guess what they found? Where the top talent goes, other top talent follows … and so does the money. Venture capitalists are now requesting this talent migration data to predict where the next big tech investments are headed.

(and if you can’t trust VCs instincts on talent value, who can ya trust?)

So we’ve established that talented employees have excellent platforms to talk about workplaces they enjoy, and that potential potential new talent (and investors) listen to what employee advocates say about their workplaces in the physical and digital spaces they inhabit. So it makes sense to ensure that your most talented people can seal the deal when they’re in the moment, influencing someone with great potential. Which leads me to my final point…

Technology already exists that makes ‘sourcing in the moment’ a reality.

As distracted as we all are, you’ve got to arm your best employee advocates with the tools to take action in the moment — on the plane, waiting for the espresso, or telling all in a LinkedIn update.

Nabbing these opportunities is easier than you might expect, since everything you’d ask on an initial application already exists on a social profile.

Think about it: work history, skills, maybe even amazing samples of work — it’s all there waiting for you.

With over 460 million LinkedIn profiles online, this kind of information is nearly ubiquitous amongst business professionals; and if someone doesn’t have a LinkedIn Profile, you’re likely to find them on another, more geo- or industry-specific profile such as Xing, AngelList, Dribbble, or Github.

So does the potential work Unicorn sitting next to you really need to fill out an formal application? You already know you love them — all you need to do is find an elegant way to turn that simple LinkedIn invite (or AngelList connection, etc) into an application of sorts, and share it with your team.

Right now, Breezy’s Google Chrome extension makes it as easy for you and your team to import a candidate to your recruiting workflow as it is for them to exchange a business card at a cocktail party. Stay in the moment. Think ONE STEP.

Unlike the invitations and connections that get lost among the buttercups of your employees’ social platforms, you and your team can keep the dedicated recruiting conversations going from right inside Breezy … and with any luck, hire your next Unicorn.

What about all those browsers on your Career Site, you wonder?

If you’re worried about missing out on the piles of interested passive candidates that visit your Career Portal every day, it’s time for you to meet our Hello 👋 Messenger.

Hello is a first-of-its-kind, AI-assisted messenger designed to proactively engage with passive and semi-active candidates, collect their resumes and contact details, then bring them into your candidate pool … right from your own careers site or jobs page.

Pretty much the easiest way to broaden your talent pool with a new category of passive candidate, right on the spot.

What about Employee Referrals, you ask?

Glad you did.

Breezy keeps your whole team up to date on current openings that their network can fill with a custom, gated portal, and we make it super-simple for them to add applicable network friends into an open position workflow.

One link, one import, one cool, cool way to make sure your engaged employees can bring in fresh talent.

Oh and one last bit of advice. After you’ve made it ridiculously easy for your team to source in the moment, you’ll want to keep that momentum going by rewarding them … and you may need to give your employees more reason to bring their networks to the table than a carrot at the end of a stick.

What about a continuous reward (essentially, a trophy for participation)?

They refer or source 10 employees. That’s a $10 coffee-place gift certificate. 20 is $20, and so on. Of course, this should be more customized for your organization, but the idea is to gamify advocacy … reward the habit of participation, even if there’s no big win (aka, a hire) in sight.

Carpe diem, carpe candidatum!

Start taking advantage of the passive candidates all around you — sign up for a free trial of Breezy, and see how simple recruiting better talent, faster can really be.