3 Strategies for Staying Top of Mind With Candidates

How to “warm up” talent as part of your proactive sourcing approach

To engage the best candidates, you need to make them aware of your existence.  “Out of sight, out of mind” applies to talent acquisition as much as it does to traditional marketing.

Companies need to understand all the potential places they can interact with their target audience – the touch points. New analysis among millions of email messages sent on LinkedIn (InMails) shows that companies which successfully engage their target audiences at all touch points on LinkedIn see a doubling in response rates..

There are three things that successful talent acquisition teams do well to stay top of mind:

1. They listen to their target audience(s) and understand what motivates them
2. They invest in their employer brand and differentiate their messages to cut through the clutter, positioning their brand to “occupy” a prospective candidate’s mind
3. They contact “warmed up” leads through a proactive recruiting strategy

Investment in employer brand not only helps position your company more clearly in the minds of your target audience, it also leads to increased opportunities for engagement. Groupon is one example of a company currently looking at all the ways that they can engage engineers in active dialogue, to reinforce that the company is a great place for tech talent to work.

LinkedIn measures the success with which companies engage a target audience through the Talent Brand Index . And Groupon, despite a competitive landscape and varying media coverage, has consistently been able to raise their TBI scores and attract candidates.

We all know that we are more likely to respond to someone we’re familiar with. For companies this familiarity can be developed through “warming” of leads and by owning the various touch points on or off LinkedIn. Think of your presence at a career fair, the messages you post on social networks, having a well-defined career site that is targeted to your audience, or the jobs that you put in front of passive candidates on LinkedIn.  And with that increased familiarity, companies increase the likelihood of passive candidates responding to their InMails and engaging in dialogue.

There are two factors that accelerate the warming of leads:

• Building a multi-touch point strategy that leverages the right social platforms: Adopt a multi-pronged approach to engage your target audience. That includes active participation by your recruiters in all the places your audience “hangs out”.
• Striking while the iron is hot: the more recent the engagement, the more likely a candidate will respond to a call or email. Candidates who were engaged in the last month are over 33 percent more likely to respond than those who were last engaged six months ago.

To summarize: in order to stay top of mind, you need to understand your audience, proactively communicate with relevant, compelling content, and continuously invest in brand awareness. These efforts will lead to a more effective passive talent strategy and improved recruiter productivity.

To boost your ability to stay top of mind with candidates, download our Employer Brand Playbook.