How My Company’s HR Started Using Sales Tools for Recruiting

As you probably know, my company is creating a tool for sales and marketing pros that helps to find just about anyone’s business email address. In the beginning, our team was very small and we were all sitting in one small space. My colleagues from the HR department were working right next to me, so I soon learned that the biggest challenge for most HR professionals is attracting the best candidates.

In fact, some of the recruiters spend up to 23 hours to screen resumes and shortlist candidates for a single position. Moreover, Linkedin discovered that although the hiring volume keeps increasing, the size of recruiting teams and the budget stay the same. This was also the case with our company, and our recruiters had no other choice but to get creative. So, they started using Oxyleads Prospector for headhunting.

Hiring Hack — Using Lead Generation Tool

Although Prospector is built to generate leads or gather business insights on competitors or potential customers, the fact that it contains business contacts of million people made it an excellent source of passive candidates.

In general, sales tools help find skilled professionals who are willing to change their jobs and give you a way of connecting with potential employees. It can be an email address, a phone number or simply a person’s name that you or your recruitment team can put in the search field on Linkedin or Facebook.

When looking for leads, our sales reps put specific skills as search keywords. To find a key person in their prospect’s company, our recruiters used the same tactic and filtered potential candidates by job title, location, skills, competencies, and other data points. This way, they were able to find multiple candidates, approach them via social media and book some interviews.

Why It’s Important to Look for Passive Candidates

The Undercover Recruiter notes that by taking a more proactive approach and choosing the candidates themselves, companies can make careful, well-informed choices on the exact type of candidate they want for their business. The downside — passive candidates may truly be happy at their current job and have no interest in leaving.

According to my HR colleagues, the most valuable benefit from approaching passive candidates is that they won’t receive other offers from competitors during the interview process, since they aren’t actively looking for a new job. Of course, you can be potentially wasting time contacting people who have no intention of switching companies. However, if you find the perfect candidate through this recruiting technique, it will definitely worth the extra effort.

Well-Suited for Startups and Small Businesses

If you’re a startup or an SMB, having access to business data means that you can find new employees and new customers without paying for the same thing twice. Also, it’s pretty common that in smaller companies, recruitment functions fall to the founder or CEO of the company.

This might become an issue because if the CEO or senior directors spend too much time looking for potential candidates, other important business tasks suffer. However, using sales tools, such as Oxyleads, can become a welcome alternative for startups and small businesses. Using it not only for sales but also for the recruitment, as my colleagues did, can give you a big push forward.