Proactive recruitment is all about sourcing and nurturing talent before you need it, building diverse talent pools that you can draw from when you need to place a candidate quickly.

For recruitment agency owners, proactive recruitment or proactive sourcing needs to be a core component of your agency’s day-to-day activities. 

Encourage your recruiters to proactively source talent, fostering relationships and searching for candidates within their own database.

Our CEO Martin Herbst sat down with global recruitment advisor Greg Savage to discuss proactive recruitment trends and the key tips agency owners should keep in mind. 

You can watch the discussion in the interview below or keep reading to find out Greg’s top tips for proactive recruiting.

1. You need to be finding candidates your clients can’t

The JobAdder half-yearly recruitment industry reports have revealed that there was a big boost in the use of proactive sourcing during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, in recent quarters, that uptick in use has decreased and somewhat plateaued. Greg believes that this is a big problem.

“We have to remember, that when you boil it all back, for recruitment agencies, your real value is to find candidates that your clients can’t. If organisations could find candidates easily, and they’ve all got in-house teams, and they’ve all got the same tools like SEEK and LinkedIn, if they could find them easily, they wouldn’t be coming to recruitment agencies. To go back to those traditional mechanisms is a mistake.”

“If you can find candidates that your clients can’t, you will fill jobs. The JobAdder data has proven that there is a massive difference in the time to fill a job when it’s filled from the agency’s own resources, rather than going out and recruiting from scratch. People often think, well that’s just a matter of days. It’s not, it’s a matter of opportunity too, because if you leave a job open for 14 days, somebody else will fill it.”

2. Nurture your talent pool and engage with candidates

While you may have built a huge talent pool filled with great candidates, it’s important to remember that your agency and your recruiters need to stay top of mind for these candidates.

Greg stresses that engagement is critical. “It’s a blend of automation, smart automation, keeping in touch with people, opportunities, webinar invites, etc. Asking: “‘What are you doing now? We haven’t spoken to you for a while.” There’s a lot of technologies, including JobAdder, that can allow you to do that, but humans can too.”

“I’d be encouraging an owner to say to their temp recruiters, for example, every person we placed in a temp job in the last year that we’ve not got working now, let’s contact them by next Tuesday night. That would be a smart thing to do.”

“Our first port of call when we have to fill a job is, we have these candidates already and not only are they in there, but they’ve heard from us recently. So if they get a call from us, it’s not like “Greg who? Never heard of you.” We were in touch in some way, and they’re ready and open for a conversation. That’s the competitive advantage.”

By combining smart automation with the human touch, recruiters can build strong relationships with a large pool of candidates. 

FREE EBOOK: How to scale your recruitment agency with marketing automation

3. Don’t forget about the candidates you didn’t place

One part of proactive recruiting that can prove crucial is making the most of the candidates that came second or third on your shortlist.

Greg states that you shouldn’t let them languish in your talent pool. “In this medium-sized agency, we placed 300 people last year, but to place 300 people, there’d be another 600 who are on the shortlist or another 400 who are on the shortlist. They had second interviews, they were good, we ranked them good and they did well. They just missed out. Where are they? When did we last speak to them? Are we going to let them drift off into the sunset and have to run an ad to re-recruit them?”

Searching for talent within your own talent pool (rather than posting an endless stream of job ads) will empower your recruiters to find and place talent quicker than ever before, which means boosted productivity and revenue for your agency.