Perfect fit candidates are, by definition, extra hard to find. But the good news is, you have the necessary skills to dig them out, and that’s what makes you so indispensable to your clients – especially in this candidate-short market.
So how do you find those gold dust candidates your clients won’t be seeing on job boards? Here’s how…
Create candidate personas
If you want to source gold dust talent, you first need to have a clear understanding of who you’re looking for.
Creating candidate personas based on your client’s role profile will help you understand what gold dust candidates look like to your client, who those candidates are where they spend their time online.
The research you do for your personas will influence every part of the recruitment process, from how you write your job ads, to where you market the role to ensure you’re looking in all the right places.
To help you get started with creating your candidate personas, download this free Recruitment Marketing Persona Toolkit.
Write gold dust job ads
Candidates that boast highly sought-after skills and experience essentially have their pick of the market. So if you’re going to convince them to be interested in the job you have on, you need to write a job ad that appeals directly to their skillset and helps them visualise themselves in the role.
To pull in the right crowd, include industry-specific language and keywords relevant to the candidate's niche. Use the title to be clear and transparent: include role, location and salary and any information of WFH options or any other non-monetary perks that matter to this type of candidate.
And while it’s good to target the right skillset, try not to focus too much on the must haves. Your perfect candidate might not fit 100% of the criteria but still be gold dust! Don’t risk ruling out highly qualified candidates if some aspects of the role can be taught on the job.
Go beyond job boards
Any client can post an ad on a job board and wait for the candidates to trickle in. To get to those gold dust candidates you need to be savvy and use the alternatives to job boards.
Of course, there’s no point spending time, effort and your marketing budget on places your candidates simply aren’t spending time on.
According to your candidate persona – is your gold dust candidate likely to be spending their day scrolling LinkedIn, or Facebook? Laser focus your efforts on platforms swimming with the right type of talent for this role.
Target passive candidates
Clients tend to target candidates who are actively looking for jobs, but 70% of the market is made up of passive candidates. By using your expert recruitment skills, you’ll be able to reach passive candidates who don’t even know they’re ready for a new opportunity.
Having a passive candidate strategy in place will open you up to a huge chunk of potential candidates that your clients don’t know exist!
Your CRM is your secret weapon here as this is a tool that your clients don’t have access to, so use this to your advantage. If your talent pools are set up with the right criteria, they’ll pull in any perfect-fit candidates you already have in your database who you can reach out to.
For more ideas on how to target passive candidates, read this blog.
Hyper-personalise your approach
It’s not just about finding gold dust candidates but engaging them too. If you can’t get them to talk, how can you spec them in to your client?
Gold dust candidates are likely to hear from recruiters quite often, so they’ll be able to spot a cut-and-paste job a mile off. So focus on the quality of your outreach, not the quantity of candidates you message!
Avoid bombarding candidates with generic phrases like ‘you’re the ideal fit’ - show them you’ve done your research by using specific examples and drawing connections between their experience and why that would make them love the role.
And if you really want to stand out, get creative with your approach - using video in your outreach will get you 3 x higher response rate.
Download the eBook below for more tips on how to recruit for those hard to fill roles.
