Recruiters need to proactively engage candidates, says new report

Proactively engaging with candidate databases will yield better results for recruitment firms, according to new research from CRM recruitment software provider Bullhorn and Herefish, a company that builds automation tools for recruiting.

The research centred on how recruitment firms engage with candidates amid talent shortages. It found that 63% of recruitment firms are more likely to have their applicant tracking system (ATS) as their main source of engaging with candidates.

At the same time, the authors surveyed 500 firms in different industries and found that most rely on job boards and LinkedIn to find candidates; 80% said that engaging candidates is important to their business and 83% said that ATS data is valuable.

Proactively engaging with candidates through ATS data will help identify the top talent in a field, said Jason Heilman, co-founder of Herefish.

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“In the current candidate climate, firms can’t just search their databases for long-forgotten candidates and expect to hire them. Regularly nurturing these candidates not only keeps relationships warm, but also alerts recruiters for when they might be ready for a new opportunity,” he said.

Other findings in the research included:

• 59% of respondents said that email is the most effective means of communication yet only 32% said that they send emails regularly.
• 84% said email marketing would be an effective way of communicating with candidates.
• 44% of firms said they have some kind of full-time marketing staff while 14% don’t do any marketing at all.
• For firms with no marketing staff, they may rely on other staff to carry out this task. Firms with a proper marketing professional and divisions are 86% more likely to send out emails regularly and 42% more likely to have a referral program for candidates.

The authors of the research also added that recruitment divisions aren’t engaging with their candidate databases because marketing departments usually manage these databases.