By Colleen Barraclough, VP of Operations - North America
The existing data in your candidate database may be your most valuable asset when it comes to finding top talent.
Whether you have thousands or tens of thousands of candidates in your database, many of these candidates have heard of you before. You’ve engaged with them, and they have probably previously applied for a job through your organization.
These candidates are known as “warm candidates”. They’re familiar with your company or agency, and if their prior experience with you was positive, they’re much more likely to be receptive to any potential opening you contact them about—especially compared to a cold candidate you’re contacting for the first time.
Warm candidates in your database have also already been vetted to some extent. You have their resumes, contact information, and notes from previous interviews or interactions. This pre-existing knowledge allows you to screen the candidate more quickly, helping to speed up the recruitment process and reduce your time to hire.
Even though these warm candidates are there, they’re still overlooked—why is that? In this article, we’ll explore the reasons behind this and provide actionable tips on how to leverage your database to find and place more warm candidates from your talent pool.
Why are candidates overlooked in your database?
If your company's talent pool is full of great candidates, why is it often an underutilized resource for finding candidates? There are a few reasons:
- Less experienced recruiters often prefer searching for candidates through external job boards and social media sites.
- Candidate profiles within the database may be incomplete, contain incorrect information, or have duplicate records.
- Recruiters might lack adequate training on how to effectively search their database, or they might not have the necessary tools for efficient database utilization.
Addressing these three issues begins with ensuring candidate profiles within your database are up-to-date and enriched with rich, structured data. An up-to-date database enables your recruiters to search and source talent from the database effectively. It provides them with a trustworthy, solid resource they can focus on, reducing their reliance on third-party job boards and other candidate-sourcing platforms.
How you can get the most out of your candidate data
Utilize resume parsing and automation technology
Without the correct technology, candidate profiles within your database will inevitably become outdated or cluttered with irrelevant data over time. That becomes a problem when your recruiters attempt to utilize that data.
For example, a recruiter might identify a suitable candidate and attempt to contact them, only to find their email address is out of date or their phone number is missing. This leads to recruiters wasting valuable time trying to contact a candidate they can’t reach. Multiply this effect over tens to hundreds of candidates and it's easy to see how your recruiters could be wasting hours chasing candidates they can’t get hold of.
The way to combat this is to ensure you have resume parsing and resume analysis software integrated into your recruitment database.
These technologies specifically target the core issue of outdated candidate information by automatically scanning, extracting and organizing key data from every resume you receive. When a new candidate sends their resume to one of your monitored sources, your database is automatically checked to see if a record for the candidate already exists. If it doesn’t, then a new candidate profile will be created based on the candidate information extracted from the resume.
If an existing profile is found for the candidate, then relevant information from the updated resume (such as contact details and employment history) will be extracted and overwritten on the existing candidate profile.
Over time these automated processes help to keep every profile in your database current and up-to-date, so when a recruiter contacts a candidate they can do so in confidence, knowing that the key data in their profile is accurate.
Deploy a candidate search tool
Even if the candidate profiles within your database are up to date, your recruiters still need to be able to quickly find and identify relevant candidates.
The easiest way to do this is to ensure you have a high-quality candidate search tool.
These search and match tools integrate with your candidate database or ATS, and enable your recruiters to simultaneously search a candidate database, job boards, and social media sites. Equipped with AI-powered search capabilities among many other advanced features, these tools allow recruiters to perform nuanced searches using natural language processing (NLP). Consequently, recruiters can input job descriptions or candidate requirements in plain English, and the software will intelligently match these with the most relevant profiles in the database.
This means recruiters can bypass the cumbersome task of individually searching through multiple candidate sources. This approach saves time, enables recruiters to find candidates more quickly, and reduces time to hire.
Prioritize ongoing training for your recruiters
You can have an up-to-date talent pool and the necessary recruitment software solutions in place, but if your recruiters aren’t effectively trained to use your database or the software that complements it, they won't be able to make the most of it. The solution is to ensure your recruiters are effectively trained on the key software solutions within your tech stack.
Effective strategies to achieve this include:
- Conduct regular, interactive training sessions that cover both basic navigation and advanced functionalities of your database and recruitment software. These should be designed to keep your team up-to-date with the latest features and best practices.
- Designate an experienced recruiter or a team member as the 'Software Champion.' This person can serve as the go-to expert for training and supporting other recruiters in using the database and software efficiently.
- Create tailored training materials, such as step-by-step guides, how-to videos, and cheat sheets that are specific to your organization's processes and the software you use.
Ongoing software training should ideally be built into your organization's learning and development strategy to ensure your employees can continually upskill and get the most out of the recruitment solutions they are using.
Learn more about how to successfully train your recruiters on new recruitment software solutions in our blog post: 5 steps for successful recruitment software onboarding
Send candidates highly relevant content
There are many ways to stay in touch with candidates, and ideally, every contact you have with a candidate should be personalized. One of the easiest to prioritize and arguably the most important is ensuring you send relevant job openings to your candidates.
You can ask your recruiters to do this manually, involving them in meticulously reviewing each candidate to ensure their skills match the open role and align with the industry. Or, explore automated solutions to automatically analyze candidate profiles and match them with open roles.
These solutions streamline the process by running workflows that swiftly identify potential candidate matches based on skills, experience, qualifications, and other relevant factors. The identified candidates are then shortlisted and matched to a relevant open position, ready for your recruiters to reach out to.
Open positions aren’t the only pieces of communication your candidates are interested in. Some other examples of personalized content that can be beneficial are:
- State of the industry reports that let candidates the latest trends in their field of work.
- Annual industry salary reports that give candidates an idea of whether they are being paid market rates in their existing role, or whether they could earn more elsewhere.
- Blog posts and expert insights into topics that may be relevant to specific candidates, such as resume writing best practices, or salary negotiation tips.
Harnessing the power of your recruitment database
These tips shine a light on the untapped potential that might be in your talent pool. If you ensure that each candidate record is up-to-date, your recruiters can start to find more suitable candidates, reduce time to hire, and, most importantly, help more people find their dream jobs.
At Daxtra, we aim to help recruiters build stronger relationships and make more placements by saving them time on manual work. To see how our intelligent recruitment automation solutions can help streamline your workflows, contact us today.
For more on Colleen's former recruitment experience, see our blog post, Using our expertise to build a better product.
