3 Simple ways to reach passive candidates
When it comes to job seekers, there are two main types: passive candidates and active candidates. Passive candidates are those who are not actively looking for a new job but might be open to the right opportunity. Active candidates, on the other hand, are actively searching for a new position. With only an estimated 30% of the global workforce actively looking for a new role, reaching passive candidates is not only a strategy for your legal recruiting, but a necessity.
In our previous article, Attracting & Engaging Top Legal Talent, we discussed the four pillars of attracting candidates to your law firm. Here, we are going to discuss how legal recruiters can go out connect the dots back to your firm.
ONE | INTERNAL CANDIDATE POOL
Legal recruiting can be a time-consuming process, especially if you don’t have an active talent pool to draw from. A talent pool is a group of people with the potential to be developed into future employees or leaders of a law firm. In other words, it’s a group of people who have the right skills and attributes to excel in your law firm’s specific area of practice.
There are a number of ways to develop an active talent pool. One is to invest in employee development programs that identify high-potential employees and provide them with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. Think of it this way: wouldn’t it make more sense to develop your internal team to advance within your company, and then replace lower level/entry level jobs instead of finding someone that is senior in their experience? Food for thought.
Externally, you should be leveraging social media and in-person networking events to actively connect with top legal talent around your area. You should be developing a data pool of potential candidates for future positions. This cannot be done disingenuously, though. It is time consuming, but necessary to approach this in the right way.
Offer to meet with candidates for a virtual coffee chat, have an online database of candidates that you take the time to review and engage as they’ve been submitted and ongoing (don’t just let them sit there). Create an email campaign to go out to that database, highlighting your workplace culture. By establishing a consistent line of communication, you can more easily develop relationships with potential candidates and stay up to date on their latest work.
This first point here is one of the biggest reasons law firms find it more valuable to hire a legal recruiter that does this daily as a part of their business operations. We are engaging and networking with potential candidates and legal professionals constantly. We make it our job, so you don’t have to.
TWO | RECRUITING TOOLS
There are several tools out there that make it “easier” for you to find passive candidates, though they are expensive. Indeed, Monster, and other job boards have online resume services that can help you connect with candidates that may be passively looking.
LinkedIn Recruiter is another option to reach candidates that keep it hidden they are interested in other opportunities. You have to commit to this tool for a minimum of 6 months and it is quite expensive, so you will want to determine if it makes more sense to hire a legal recruiter that already uses these platforms as part of their business operations. Further, you will want to analyze if you truly have the time to dedicate to advance searching, outreach, and engagement with passive candidates.
It only takes one too many days to respond to leave a negative impression in a candidates mind about your law firm. If you’re going to do direct outreach to passive candidates using recruiting tools, make sure you have the time to dedicate! It isn’t uncommon for us to hop on a call at 5:30 at night to accommodate their privacy needs with their current employment.
Finally, if you leverage this type of outreach, you want to make sure that your message is coming across in a powerful yet non-pushy way. You don’t want to sound like the million contingency recruiters out there that blast the same message to 500 candidates. Use the system wisely, and don’t give your law firm a bad “poacher” name.
THREE | ESTABLISH A REFERRAL PROGRAM
When you’re ready to hire, consider a referral program with your own current employees as well as the masses beyond. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to offer to your internal network a little referral fee for sending you someone great that you end up hiring.
For instance, at Del.Trust, we have a wide range of connections in the legal community from law firm marketers to membership leaders. When we have new positions, we know who can spread the word to a lot of awesome people.
Everyone you know has their own networks and personal connections. Your perfect fit might be webbed deep in one of them. Passive candidates may be hesitant to respond to a direct message soliciting them for a job, but they’re much more likely to consider an opportunity presented to them by a personal connection.
CONCLUSION
While passive candidates can be harder to find, they can be worth the effort as they are often high-quality candidates who are already employed and thus not actively looking for a new job. Ultimately, the best candidate is the one who is the right fight for the position and the company, regardless of whether they are a passive or active candidate.
We specialize in that right fit here at Del.Trust. We don’t make it our company approach to send you a lot of bad applicants fast. We focus on aligning the right people around the right priority with the right processes so you can enable predictable and sustainable growth in your law firm.