You’ve already met your next hire: Leverage your existing candidates to get more placements

by Great Recruiters Oct. 3rd, 2024

Category: Tips, Tricks, and How-Tos

This post was contributed by Bullhorn Marketplace partner Great Recruiters.

You’ve invested significant time and resources in attracting top talent. You’ve even learned about your candidate’s career goals and their ideal role. You took all this time to get to know them – but you didn’t have a good fit for them at the time. What happens to all those promising candidates? 

Instead of continuously searching for new talent, consider tapping into the goldmine you already have: your ATS. Your database of existing candidates will only work for you if your recruiters continuously build strong and personal relationships with candidates. Once the relationship is built, it’s important to maintain that connection and stay top of mind.

Here’s how to build an engaged talent pool – and leverage those candidates who already know and trust you to find your next hire.

From transactional to relationship-focused: Building trust in recruitment

It is no secret the recruitment industry still faces challenges when it comes to talent. But finding talent is no longer the problem; getting talent to want to call you back is. Part of the problem with the industry reputation is there are too many transactional recruiters who engage with candidates but don’t add any value. This creates a problem for all the great recruiters out there who strive to be advisors, confidants, and more to their candidates. 

The successful recruitment agencies who have counteracted this challenge realise that experience is everything. Look around: the top-rated agencies focus on proactive communication and create personalised experiences for each candidate.

Transforming the candidate experience

Creating personalised talent experiences, while important, can be time-consuming; here’s where tech solutions can step in. Solutions like Great Recruiters can help you automate outreach, boost referrals, and keep your finger on the pulse of what your candidates and clients are saying about your recruiters and company. Here’s how:

• Automate the collection of reviews and testimonials from your clients, candidates, and placed talent: Collect real-time feedback at the most meaningful moments of the candidate’s journey – after submittal, after placement, credentialing, onboarding, middle of assignment, end of assignment. This allows recruiters to nurture the candidate relationship.
• Measure satisfaction: Providing a phenomenal experience will keep candidates and clients coming back to you. Everyone loves five-star reviews, but collecting feedback can also help you pinpoint when you’re falling short. Turning negative experiences into positive ones gets you candidates and clients for life.
• Increase callbacks: With positive reviews, you can demonstrate to the world how you create great experiences. Provide the social proof that encourages candidates to want to call you back.
• Boost referrals: Candidates refer recruiters who they know, like, trust, and respect. 79% of candidates say a truly exceptional candidate experience raises their chances of referring others (ERE Media). Positive candidate experiences create a strong referral pipeline.

Success in action: Accrue Partners’ candidate reactivation strategy

Patty Comer, Co-founder and Principal Partner of Accrue Partners, an award-winning, women-owned total talent solutions company, wanted more control of the feedback and a way for her recruiters to build their reputation in the industry. Accrue was already creating great experiences; they just needed a way to validate it. They treated all candidates equally with personalised experiences, whether they had a job for them at the time or not.

Recognising the untapped potential of their over one million-candidate database, Patty encouraged her team to think creatively. They paused all external recruitment efforts, such as social media, job boards, and paid leads, for thirty days. Instead, they focused on re-engaging with the candidates who already knew and trusted them.

Leveraging the combined power of Great Recruiters and Bullhorn, Accrue Partners successfully identified and re-activated promising candidates. They reached out to all candidates who had previously left four- or five-star reviews on Great Recruiters. Given these candidates’ positive experiences, Accrue had high confidence in their ability to reestablish contact. Out of that initial pool, 2,000 were reactivated, and 500 were contacted for internal interviews. Ultimately, this active campaign has resulted in an additional $500,000 in placement revenue.

From dormant to goldmine

Accrue Partners’ success is a testament to the untapped potential of candidate reactivation. Their achievement is a direct result of the investment they’ve made in creating a positive candidate experience. By strategically combining Great Recruiters and Bullhorn, Accrue Partners transformed their existing candidate database into revenue working for them without spending a dime on new sourcing. This approach offers a blueprint for agencies seeking to maximise their return on investment and drive sustainable growth.

By prioritising candidate relationships and leveraging advanced technology like Great Recruiters and Bullhorn, recruitment agencies can unlock hidden potential within their existing databases, transforming dormant candidates into active assets and setting the stage for sustained growth and success.