Outbound Recruiting 101
If you’re involved in hiring people — even indirectly — I don’t have to tell you that the landscape for talent acquisition has changed dramatically over the past several years. The pandemic has had an impact on recruiting, naturally (as it has on every other aspect of life and work). The Great Resignation (or Great Reshuffle) has also played a part, leading to a higher-than-normal number of people choosing to change jobs and even careers.
The cumulative effect is a market for talent that is more complex than perhaps ever before. It’s not as simple as uniformly high levels of unemployment as we would see in a recession, resulting in generally high availability of talent. It’s not uniformly low unemployment, either, which would see every company fighting for scarce talent. The reality is that the market varies widely from one kind of role to another, and from one geography to another as well.
For some positions you may go to market and be swamped with a deluge of applications. Many of them are unqualified, but it still takes staff time and effort to screen them. For other positions, you might only see a handful of applicants. In short, it’s getting more complicated and more difficult to identify, attract, and hire the people you need.
The solution is outbound recruiting. To understand the concept, it might be easiest to think about sales and marketing as an analogy.
When you’re growing your business, you use a number of methods to attract customers. You might invest in advertising, in digital or more traditional channels depending on your product. This advertising can generate inbound leads from customers who see it, and it also helps to grow awareness for your brand more generally. Your potential customers get to know who you are because they see you around, and over time they convert.
Would you depend on advertising alone to get new business? Probably not. That’s where your sales team comes in.
Your salespeople research the marketplace to figure out who your customers might be — who the decision makers are, and how to get in touch with them. They prioritize these prospects, looking for the ones that are most likely to be a fit for your product or service. Then they connect. Reaching out to talk to the prospect, asking questions about what the prospect wants and needs, and uncovering the ways your product might address those needs. They build a relationship and nurture it over time, so that even if the prospect isn’t ready to buy the first time, the relationship can lead to business in the future.
Inbound recruitment is like advertising. It’s casting a wide net, getting the word out about your hiring needs, describing what your company offers as compellingly as possible, and then responding to the applicants as they come in — vetting, screening, interviewing, and hopefully hiring the best of them.
Outbound recruitment is more like sales. Understanding what you have to offer and who might be most interested, researching prospects, prioritizing, then reaching out to them directly. Learning about the elements that are most important to them in their career, and connecting that with the value proposition your company and the position offers. Developing a relationship over time that helps to build a rich talent pipeline for your business.
As you might imagine, I believe strongly in the value of outbound recruitment. Not for replacing inbound recruiting entirely (just as you wouldn’t choose to build business by choosing sales or marketing, but not both); for augmenting, not replacing.
I’m an advocate for introducing outbound recruiting as a complement to your traditional recruitment methods. Getting started isn’t difficult. It means finding an outbound recruiting platform that removes hurdles and makes it easier for your team to do their jobs, and building on this foundation to create an effective outbound recruitment strategy. The payoff is a recruitment team that’s more focused, efficient, and successful, and a hiring process that engages candidates and brings more of the best to your company.
I’ll be sharing more in future blogs about the reasons to move in this direction, and there are many. For the moment, I’d like to leave you with just a few.
Consider the time your team spends sifting through applications, shortlisting and vetting candidates — the majority of which aren’t a fit. Couldn’t that time be used more effectively and efficiently? Given the selection of candidates who will apply to a job posting — which, by definition, is limited — is your team seeing the best possible candidates? Are you missing out on potentially high performing employees because you’re not connecting and engaging with passive candidates?
People find jobs, or so traditional wisdom says. In the world I see coming, jobs will find people. That’s an exciting transition to make, and the companies who are successful in making that shift will win the race to hire the best.
