When it comes to targeting passive candidates for critical roles, programmatic recruitment is helping more recruiters, talent managers, and HR leaders to work efficiently and effectively — freeing up more time to dedicate to strategy and leadership rather than day-to-day routine recruiting tasks. The age-old processes of sourcing, interviewing, vetting, and onboarding talent has become increasingly simplified by new technology such as data analytics, automation, and cloud-based software that allow for better collaboration and more profound insights.

As we continue our journey into 2018, let’s explore some ways automation is improving the productivity and efficacy of corporate recruiters.

How to Target Passive Candidates

1. Personalize Your Communication

For job candidates, one of the most often-cited pet peeves besides a lack of communication from recruiters is receiving a deluge of impersonal, automated emails that read like a generic form letter to anyone. Email engagement is hard enough already. According to Smart Insights, only 20.17% of recruiting emails get opened at all, and only 2.30% get clicks. However, it’s not automation that’s killing engagement; it’s a lack of management around the automation.

Personalized salutations with the applicants’ name have been the norm for years, but it needs to go deeper than that. Recruiters should be targeting passive candidates based on skill sets, position, title, and other differentiating factors. This is especially relevant when you’re cold messaging or reaching out to passive candidates. The worst thing that could happen is for them to think they are receiving a generic message — or worse, receiving a message in error.

Marketing and recruiting have a lot of overlap, but one of the ways they differ is personalization. Recruiters should be cautious in choosing what messages and at what stage to automate. There are times when it’s better to write a personal email to an individual candidate — or, better yet, pick up the phone. However, when you do automate your messages, you can make them feel a little more human by adding your company’s unique voice to them, as suggested by SmashFly.

2. Time Wasted Scanning Resumes

Ask any recruiter what their least favorite task is, and many will say how much they hate scanning hundreds of resumes for every job opening. Not only is it time-consuming but it can also be exhausting and mind-numbingly dull. Not to mention the fact that after seeing so many resumes, they all turn into a blur and it gets more challenging to differentiate qualified candidates from the rest of the applicants.

With the use of AI-driven automated processes, reviewing and keeping track of resumes can be a more straightforward, streamlined process that doesn’t eat up chunks of time. Automated recruiting software uses artificial intelligence to scan through thousands of resumes and find the right match out of several qualified and unqualified candidates, reducing time spent on this task by up to 75%.

In an example given by The Undercover Recruiter, many recruiters tend to look for candidates who have experience in the exact role for which they are hiring, but this may leave out some qualified candidates. AI is advancing in ways that allow it to “read between the lines” of people’s resume, gain more profound insights, and uncover skills that may be ideally suited for the role but not expressly stated in their job title history.

3. Your Recruiters Are Just Not Cutting It

Whether you work as part of an external recruiting company or part of an internal talent acquisition team, continuous skill-building is essential for high-performance recruiting. So what do you do if your team just isn’t getting the results you need? Before you start firing people, consider taking advantage of an automated recruiter training platform. Reach out to your platform and ask them to do training, and be sure to engage them in ongoing practice that can also be done online or in bite-size pieces like this one by ICIMS or The Adler Group.

According to Chron, other ways to automate and streamline your recruiter training include:

• Internet resources such as industry websites, newsletters, etc.
• Online training schools like the ones previously mentioned
• Online certification classes which administer certifications
• Free webinars that can be viewed on their own time
• Blended learning that can take place both on and offline

4. Job Postings that Fail to Wow

As a job-seeker, there is nothing that is more of a turnoff than a poorly crafted job posting that fails to give adequate details and doesn’t sell the value proposition of the role to their interests. Before the automation aspect comes into play, it’s crucial that you are writing job postings that show employees your cultural values and gives them a glimpse at what it’s like to work at the organization. Be sure to include details about what they will learn and what benefits they will reap such as competitive salary, ongoing training, opportunities for advancement, etc. Targeting passive candidates in this way inspires them to consider their own potential and hopefully convinces them to switch roles.