‘The When’: Why don’t more Recruiters & Sourcers do this?

Originally published: Your Intelligent Talent Acquisition Advisors Blog

One of the challenges pretty much every company on the face of the earth encounters is not having enough qualified people to fill all their positions.

I think in the majority of cases, there are enough qualified people out there for a single company to fill all their roles in a timely manner, to me it though the challenge is more about ‘who’ and ‘when’.

Let me give you context to the ‘who’ and ‘when’

Who = Very few companies can fill all their roles through inbound candidate applications (particularly larger companies hiring hundreds/thousands of people a year). This requires proactive outbound identification on ‘who’ are you trying to identify and attract?

But, most importantly to me, particularly when your taking about sourcing & recruiting at scale, is the ‘when’………..

When = Are they available and interested now?

It’s all about timing.

In life, and specifically in recruiting, it’s all about timing.

A person that you are interested in, may not be interested in making a career move today. A qualified candidate that was interested one year ago, is no longer interested today. A person who was happy in their role last week, is now thinking about doing something different this week.

If you agree with my introduction above, then why is it so few recruiters and sourcers I speak with don’t create some simple automated strategies/tactic’s that help them solve for the ‘who’ and the ‘when’ at scale?

I hope if your reading this you don’t need me to explain in detail ‘Why’ you should be doing this.

Let me give you some free tactical examples of how to do this quickly and easily.

Years ago, I used to get my teams to ensure that anytime they found a person’s personal web page with a resume included that they liked, they could bookmark that page and then get an email notification when the person updated their resume/page. Cool right?

Let’s fast forward to today………

As a simple example, go to Indeed.com and look under the ‘find resumes’ section. I have denoted in my search that I am interested in anyone who works at Google who is a developer. Most importantly, I have also sort/filtered the list by relevance date (recently updated their resume).

See Results Here

If I was a recruiter/sourcer, I would spend a good full day building an automated process by going into sites like this (and there is lots of them) and setting up notifications of Companies + Titles + Skills I was interested in. I would also logically select options like this in the Indeed.com example where available:

Get new Resumes for this search by email

The more I can get notifications coming to me about people from specific companies with specific skills, that map to my harder to fill roles (where I don’t have enough inbound), then why would I not invest the energy to do this?

Interesting sub related point: I am not proposing that you do this, but it’s worth calling out. As you saw the names of those developers from Google out there for the world to see, did it occur to you:

What if HR and the Business received a weekly report about their employees who had recently updated their resume online knowing who is potentially unhappy (updating a resume is a reasonable signal). I wonder how many would use this information to positively effect negative attrition?

Back to Automation.

There is also a free tool called https://visualping.io/ and many others like it online.

This is an updated version of bookmarking a page (like my historical example above) which simply sends you a notification the moment a page is updated.

Clearly if a person updates a resume page, then the chances of them falling more into the ‘when’ category increases. I used to send emails to people a day or so after they updated their pages/resume. I lost count of the number of times the person said to me:

“Interesting timing Rob on your reaching out, yes, I would like to chat”.

Or good old-fashioned Google Alerts that can send you daily Alerts based on the key searches you run online to find people for those hard to fill reqs.

[Personal Side-Note: See what I did here. I thought I would balance publicly calling out all the Google Developers with updated resumes online, while giving a thumbs up to the Google Alert solution. Hopefully that’s considered a balanced POV by the folks that probably have a large online file about me :) ]

I am sure there are many more practical examples on how to help automate the strategy here, and if you would like to share your tips with your peers, please feel free to pile on.

The point I’m trying to drive home is, that anything that you can do to help improve the odd’s of getting to someone that is thinking about a change, is way smarter that having your people dial and smile through traditional cold calling techniques.

Automation = Scale

I’m not suggesting that you stop the outbound relationship building with people that are not actively looking now if that’s part of your role and recruiting strategy, but I am suggesting that given the reality of life is about timing, why not help improve your own recruiting odds in life