April 6, 2023
Patience is a virtue in most cases, but not for today’s talent teams trying to meet their company’s hiring needs. Recruiters have traditionally relied on inbound recruiting to capture and reel in qualified candidates. However, in today’s candidate-centric job market, most recruiters don’t have the luxury of waiting and hoping top-tier talent knocks on their doors. Prospects will move on to other opportunities, and competitors will swoop in.
To find the best candidates efficiently, recruiters need to be proactive in seeking out talent. In this guide, we take a look at what outbound recruiting is and why it’s giving savvy recruiters a leg up.
Outbound vs inbound recruiting is really about who makes the first move: the recruiter or the candidate. Outbound recruitment is a method of talent acquisition where recruiters or hiring managers proactively reach out to potential candidates who may not have applied for a job opening or even be actively looking for a new role. Because they aren’t active job seekers, these candidates are often referred to as passive candidates.
Outbound recruiters actively seek out top talent in their industry or field and initiate contact through various channels such as email, social media, networking events, or referrals.
In contrast, inbound recruiting primarily relies on applicants to come to you. This can be via your website, LinkedIn profile, a job board listing, or even events. The success of your inbound recruiting efforts often depends on the strength of your employer brand, but we’ll go into more detail on that later.
Inbound recruiting sounds nice, in theory. You can post a job, sit back, and let the applications roll in. However, sorting through applications and resumes to pinpoint the best fits becomes tedious for recruiters.
Outbound recruiting has its challenges, too, but there are also huge benefits to both hiring teams and candidates. Let’s review both below.
On the plus side, outbound recruiting:
Widens and deepens talent pools by not relying only on active job-seekers to fill open roles.
Gives recruiters more control over the quality and volume of talent in their pipeline because they can target profiles that meet their specific criteria. This is extremely helpful with hard-to-fill roles or fields where talent may already be scarce, like engineering and cybersecurity.
Diversifies pipelines at the very top-of-funnel, which leads to more diversity throughout the pipeline.
Means teams don’t have to rely on job postings and ads, which can get expensive!
Increases awareness of your company and its open roles, one prospect at a time.
However, it does come with a few challenges:
The time and effort it takes to source and engage passive talent can be draining on resources
Not all candidates will be up for a switch and many may not respond at all
Teams are often reliant on the information candidates available on the web, which may be outdated or incomplete
There are advantages to outbound recruiting for candidates too, including:
They’ll waste less time applying for jobs they won’t be a good fit for.
A less tedious hiring experience. If you already have enough info about them to reach out, they shouldn’t also have to complete an entire application too!
The opportunity to build relationships and trust with your company, before they’ve even started looking for a job.
From the candidate’s perspective, there are a few things to consider with outbound recruiting:
Those who are currently employed are often already overwhelmed with emails and don’t necessarily want to be bombarded by irrelevant messages from recruiters.
Passive candidates may not respond to your initial outreach, so follow-up emails are key.
Passive candidates also may not know your company exists, let alone the open roles. With outbound recruiters, it’s your team’s job to communicate what your company does and what you offer potential candidates.
There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to which strategy you choose; many companies use both. What does matter is that you consider what is right for your company and that you implement your strategy thoughtfully. Let’s take a look at the main components to consider for both.
Your career page and website. Get our tips for making yours stand out.
Your social profiles
Your employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor
Your application process
Efficient sourcing strategies and tools to identify relevant talent and build rich profiles
Automated recruiting email sequences, so you can keep top-of-mind with candidates, without having to set reminders to follow-up
Scheduling tools that make it easy for candidates to take the next steps with you
Several parts of your recruitment process that will impact both inbound and outbound recruiting. One example is employer branding. In theory, a strong employer brand naturally leads to more inbound candidates and it also generates more awareness and interest with outbound candidates. Positive Glassdoor reviews, engagement on social media, and a great experience on your site all contribute to passive candidate perceptions.
Overall communication between you and your candidates is also key, and you’ll want to make sure you tailor the emails you send to both passive and active candidates.
Ideally, all of these elements will be working together to deliver a high-quality, diverse pipeline.
There’s no need to rely on manual sourcing to identify the best talent for your company. Now, recruiters can peruse an entire marketplace of platforms dedicated to outbound recruiting. Check out this list of important questions to ask when researching sourcing tools to find the right fit for you.
In general, the best outbound recruiting tools will enable you to build a pipeline of rich, up-to-date candidate profiles and reach out to them with just a few clicks. What sets Fetcher apart from AI sourcing tools is the algorithms combined with human monitoring to deliver curated batches of candidates. With supported searches, talent teams can not only save time but connect with diverse candidates they wouldn’t have discovered on their own.
Reach out to schedule your personalized demo with the Fetcher team.
Check out our other blog posts for more talent acquisition tips and insights into recruiting trends.
At Fetcher, our mission is to introduce companies to the people who will help them change the world. Our full-service, recruiting automation platform automates those repetitive, top-of-funnel tasks, so you can focus more on candidate engagement & team collaboration. Simplify Sourcing. Optimize Outreach. Hire Top Talent. Learn more at fetcher.ai.
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