Recruiters across industries face one big challenge, how to hire the right candidate faster? You spend hours surfing through hundreds of irrelevant resumes only to learn that a day has passed and you’ve not even spoken to a candidate.
Then comes the aspect of candidate experience.
Candidates are vocal about their experience on sites like Glassdoor. Besides, applicants with poor experiences are 185% less inclined to recommend your company to other job seekers.
In this blog, we’ll cover how top recruitment agencies and corporations are using sales engagement platforms to hire the right candidates in the shortest amount of time.
As an agency owner, you might always be looking out for clients. If you are interested in knowing how to close more client deals using a similar strategy, then click here.
TL;DR
Recruiters face several challenges in finding and closing the right candidates quickly. However, a sales engagement platform like SmartReach.io can significantly streamline the hiring process and save a lot of time and effort. In this blog, we’ll discuss how sales engagement platforms can help.
- Search and reach out to passive candidates
- Hyper-personalize your communications
- Automate candidate outreach via channels like email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, calls, and messages.
- Better response management with shared team inbox
- And hire the right candidate faster
Before we jump into how to effectively use sales engagement platforms to hire the right candidates faster, let’s understand the key challenges faced.
Challenges faced by recruiters when filling positions
In addition to the above-mentioned challenges, recruiters also need to know.
- Talent shortages make it tough to find the right candidates in certain industries or skills.
- Competition for top talent is fierce, with high-demand professionals receiving multiple job offers.
- Time constraints can lead to rushed hiring decisions, balancing speed with thorough evaluations.
- Recruiter’s challenge to keep up with evolving recruitment technologies like AI tools, application tracking system.
- Remote work introduces new challenges, like assessing suitability for remote positions.
All the above challenges have pushed a section of recruiters to use passive recruitment. Let’s understand it more in detail.
Why are recruiters opting for passive hiring?
Hiring the right candidate has become quite a challenge for the recruiters. Because of this, passive hiring is gaining popularity among the recruiters.
With 70% of the workforce being passive candidates, recruiters can close more candidates.
So what is passive hiring?
When you reach out to a candidate who is not actively looking for a job, you can consider them as a potential candidate because of their skills, experience, or qualifications.
It is the process where you basically skip the crowded, actively seeking job opportunity candidates and target those who are waiting for the right job opportunity.
Essentially, you’re fishing in a different pond than traditional job boards and postings. Such talent is usually employed and satisfied in their current roles, making them less visible to conventional recruitment methods.
Here as a recruiter, your target would be to focus on building relationships and understanding your candidate’s long-term career aspirations.
Benefits of Passive Hiring
- Highly skilled individuals with proven track records.
- Tapping into new hidden talent pools for varied viewpoints.
- Demonstrates proactive commitment to attracting the best.
- Better cultural fit leads to higher retention.
- Establish a long-term relationship with individuals of a particular niche
- Reduced spending on recruitment platforms with millions of irrelevant job seekers
How to hire the right talent faster?
For this, we will need to dive deep into the passive recruitment hiring process and then understand which software will be apt to achieve the desired results.
To ensure that the next steps in the hiring process, particularly onboarding, are appropriately managed and automated, it’s also important to select the right software for that. SenseHR software systems in the UK have the features needed to achieve this goal. Those HR solutions can help companies seamlessly transition from onboarding to talent mapping, ensuring a smooth and efficient experience for both the new hire and the hiring team.
Manual processes for tasks like document collection or training scheduling can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Automating tasks like collecting documents, setting up training schedules, and introducing new hires to company culture simplifies onboarding. This saves HR professionals time, allowing them to concentrate on more important strategic projects.
Below are the stages of the passive hiring process.
Identifying the Right Talent
The process of passive hiring begins with identifying the potential candidates who have the appropriate skills and experience a company is looking for.
For this process, you can utilize social media platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter, etc, to search for professionals with relevant skills and experience.
Fast and effective ways to build lists of potential candidates
As a recruiter, you understand the significance of having verified and updated data of your prospective candidates.
You might already have your list of candidates, but it takes time to clean it up. You cannot just send mass emails out without scrubbing your list. As a good practice, you should also avoid it.
What would you say if someone offered you a list of your prospective candidates’s contact ability and work profile data sets?
It would be great, right?
Given the active engagement of millennials on LinkedIn, they constitute over 60% of the platform’s members. You have a higher chance of getting their active contact information from LinkedIn.
Prospect finder tools like ProspectDaddy can get you a list of enriched data such as email addresses, candidates’ LinkedIn profile URLs, their designation, current company, location, etc in a few minutes.
For example, you are looking for Java developers.
On LinkedIn, you can search for your relevant candidate and apply the required filters like location, industry, etc.
Let’s say you are using ProspectDaddy. In that case, you need to install the Chrome extension and sign up. (New users would get 50 credits free). Write to me ([email protected]) if you need more credits 😉
While you already have your list ready on LinkedIn, the moment you sign into ProspectDaddy, automatically, the search starts, and you get the email addresses displayed on the extension.
You will get an option to download the list in CSV format. The CSV file would also have details like first name, last name, title, organization, location, LinkedIn profile, etc.
Within a few minutes, you get a list of email addresses of your prospective candidates.
Connecting and Building Relationships
Once you identify your potential candidates and build your lists, you should reach out connect, and start engaging to build relationships with them. You should personalize your talent outreach with targeted messages, where you can highlight career opportunities and company culture and push the candidate to get on a call.
On the call, you should engage in genuine conversation and understand the candidate’s career aspirations and motivation. You can provide some insights and resources but make sure not to be too pushy.
Now let’s set up a candidate outreach campaign targeting those Java developers we pospected using ProspectDaddy. I am explaining the sequence by taking one of the best sales engagement platforms, SmartReach.io, as an example.
Now you might not know what a candidate outreach sequence means. Below is a sample candidate outreach sequence.
Sample Talent Outreach Sequence
Step 1: LinkedIn Profile View
(Day 1)
You can go for the LinkedIn profile view as the first step, as it will have a higher chance of getting noticed than sending an email.
Most of the LinkedIn users would be interested in knowing about their profile viewers.
Step 2: Send Email
(Day 2)
In the next step, you can schedule an introductory email. While setting up the campaign, you can save your email content.
You can get your email content AI-generated by providing some inputs based on how you want your emails to look. You can generate multiple versions of the emails.
You can use merge tags to make your emails hyper-personalized. If you want to highlight any of their special skills or achievements, etc.
SmartReach also provides spintax if you want each of your emails to look different.
SmartReach’s cold email masterclass can help you in drafting the perfect email.
Step 3: LinkedIn connect request
(Day 3)
On the third day of your campaign, you can send an automated LinkedIn connection request with a personalized message. This would help in grabbing the attention of your prospective candidate.
Step 4: Follow-up Email
(Day 5)
Then, you can schedule a follow-up email on the 5th day of your talent outreach campaign. The thing is you don’t have to remind yourself to send a follow-up, it would go automatically.
Remember, you just need to create the campaign steps in SmartReach and keep a close eye on the campaign without any manual intervention.
You should also keep some best practices in mind while drafting email.
Step 5: LinkedIn send a message
(Day 7)
On the seventh day of your campaign, you can choose to send a personalized LinkedIn message. You can either choose to send an automated message or add it as a manual step (just in case you want to check the CTC being offered or designation before sending it)
So this is just an example of how you can create a sequence using multichannel outreach. As per your requirement, you can make your sequence using messages, Calls and WhatsApp as well.
So, as step 6, you could create a calling step, where you could your SmartReach calling features and directly call the candidate. Such manual steps show up in your “Task Manager” section, where all tasks for the day get scheduled for execution.
When you choose to call your prospective candidate, you need to know all about cold calling, tips techniques and strategies that you should follow.
When your candidate responds the campaign stops for that candidate, else you have the option to manually stop the campaign.
Once you have set up the campaign, you need not redo it again to reach out for any other opening; you just have to duplicate the campaign and make the required changes to the content. Then you are good to go.
SmartReach provides a detailed reporting facility where you can track your campaign’s performance. This would help to make data-driven decisions.
So now that your campaign is set, how are you going to manage all the responses that you will receive? Yes, they will start pouring in.
SmartReach has the solution to it as well.
SmartReach provides a shared inbox feature, a central hub for all candidate interactions. It keeps everything organized and accessible to everyone in your team, avoiding scattered messages and duplicate efforts. It helps with better response management.
So how can a recruitment agency benefit from a shared inbox?
Since you are getting a consolidated view of all the candidate’s interactions, it would save you time and energy to check each response individually.
Let’s take the example of the Java candidates requirement, where you have to fill ten positions, and you run an outreach campaign for 2000 candidates.
You receive responses from 300 candidates, both positive and negative combined. (Remember that these are candidates based on your search criteria, and hence all are relevant with the right experience)
How do you differentiate both the responses?
SmartReach provides a reply sentiment feature, where you can filter out the positive response. It would give you a clarity of how your candidate pipeline looks like.
This way, recruiters can create opportunity pipelines for all their job openings and track it on a daily basis of movements within the pipeline.
You also get additional features along with the shared inbox like leaving internal notes for better reference, zero chance of your candidate’s response slipping through the cracks, prevention of duplicate responses, etc.
Making an Offer
When you feel you have built a good rapport with the candidate, you should showcase the opening that would fit the passive candidate’s profile. You should personalize your opening offer based on the candidate’s interest and skills.
You should be transparent about the hiring process and the company culture. You should offer a competitive compensation & benefits.
Remember to be patient and give some time to the candidate to think over the offer as it might take longer for the passive candidates to make a decision.
Here again, you could set up a flow to make offer calls and send offer emails to interested candidates. The possibilities are endless.
With the overall process, you provide your candidate with a better experience. You will be able to respond to their queries faster, ensuring timely, consistent communication.
Consider integrating psychometric assessments into your hiring process as well, offering a more comprehensive understanding of candidates’ capabilities and compatibility with the role.
By incorporating these assessments, you not only enhance your evaluation methods but also demonstrate a commitment to making informed decisions that align with both the company’s needs and the individual’s strengths. This holistic approach contributes to a more efficient and personalized recruitment experience for both parties involved.
Recruitment agencies also use CRM tools to manage their candidates and maintain their status. Few tools like SmartReach provide a free CRM with their plan where agencies can manage talent outreach campaigns for multiple clients simultaneously. You create a centralized CRM with candidates and then keep building on this database
For agencies or businesses that already have their CRM, sales engagement platforms like SmartReach.io also provide two-way sync and data flow with all leading CRMs like Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho Recruit, etc. so that your data is always updated.
This makes it easy for the recruiters to stay organized and manage their workflows.
How can a sales engagement platform ease the process?
So now that you know that passive hiring is the way forward, you should also know how to get the entire process set up seamlessly without putting much effort.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just automate the whole process?
Sales engagement platforms like SmartReach.io can help you save a lot of time and effort, making the process simpler.
Let’s check in what ways it can be helpful.
Multichannel outreach
You need not just rely on emails to get in touch with your potential candidates. Few sales engagement platforms provide multiple channels to contact your candidates.
You can use LinkedIn, WhatsApp, messages, and calling to reach out to your potential candidates. The interesting fact is all these can be done from a single platform with a single sign-on.
Email Automation
This feature eliminates the repetitive task of copying and pasting email content. Once you have compiled a list of candidates you want to contact, you can initiate a campaign. The emails will be automatically sent out at scheduled times.
Automated follow-ups
You will also enjoy the advantage of sending automatic follow-up emails to candidates until they respond. You can customize the content of these follow-ups and choose how frequently you want them sent. Plus, you can manually stop these follow-ups whenever you prefer.
Personalization at Scale
These platforms offer an option to hyper-personalize your emails using merge tags. You can gather details about your candidate’s online activity, recent accomplishments, or latest projects and include these details using merge tags in your emails.
AI-Powered Content
Some of the sales engagement platforms, like SmartReach.io, provide the option to generate AI-generated emails. You have to provide some prompts like your audience details, email writing style, tonality, words, etc. So based on which, you will get your email content.
You can even shorten or rephrase any particular phrase or paragraph. You will also have the option to get an AI-generated subject line based on your email content.
This feature gives you a clear view of your candidate pipeline. You can see all responses from potential candidates in one place. Platforms like SmartReach.io even offer reply sentiments, summarizing positive and negative replies for an overview.
Detailed Reporting
These platforms provide detailed reports where you can make data-driven decisions, rather than guesswork.
You can keep track of key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and response times for each channel and decide which channel works the best. You can analyze your potential candidate’s engagement patterns and identify topics that sparked interest.
Candidate Prospecting
Sales engagement platforms such as SmartReach.io offer users free ProspectDaddy credits.
ProspectDaddy is a LinkedIn email finder tool that gives you verified business email addresses of potential candidates.
Combining ProspectDaddy with SmartReach.io simplifies and speeds up your work, boosting your productivity.
Now you have an overview of how a sales engagement platform can make your life easier and reduce your work load.
Get more clients with the Sales Engagement Platform
Finding new clients can be a real headache for recruitment agencies.
You try to go to networking events, ask for referrals, and send endless emails, but nothing gives the desired result. It’s tough to stand out from the crowd and get noticed by the right people.
What if there is a way out, that would make the entire process easier and more effective?
With a sales engagement platform, you can automate the process of finding and reaching out to new clients.
In the exact same way, you can search for decision-makers and extract their email addresses and set up an outreach campaign.
You can set up the sequence in the manner you feel it is appropriate. With the entire process being automated, the struggle of looking out for clients can be reduced quite significantly.
Take away on hiring the right candidate faster
Using sales engagement platforms like SmartReach.io can help you with
- Reduce time-to-hire: Close positions faster and meet client deadlines.
- Improve candidate experience: Offer personalized communication and timely responses.
- Increase efficiency & productivity: Automate repetitive tasks and optimize the hiring process.
- Land more clients: Automate client acquisition and build stronger relationships.
To conclude, sales engagement platforms bring everything together in one place and make it easier to reach out to your potential candidates and clients. They save time, make communication smoother, and help agencies make strong connections and hire the right candidate faster.
