Why is Outbound Recruiting Important to Fuel Your Company's Growth?

If the already panicked recruitment market wasn’t enough – the pandemic, mass layoffs, great resignation and the great recession further shook the industry apart. There exists a huge gap between demand and supply of hireable talent now. Fulfilling industry needs and expectations is a continuous struggle for recruiters. Given the exponentially rising requirements and growth in the number of passive candidates, outbound recruiting is the most reliable hiring solution.

More jobs are available as compared to the number of candidates today. A majority of the total workforce – around 73% of them are passive candidates, which means they are not looking for jobs at all. Hence recruiters clearly cannot wait for inbound leads i.e. applications through job boards from active job seekers. Why? Because hiring quality talent is the top priority for most of us.

If you’re worried about not being able to get quality candidates for your hiring campaigns, maybe you are not doing much outbound recruiting. Is something stopping you? Whatever it is – we'll help you solve it with this blog. Let’s dive in straight for an insightful discussion on outbound recruiting and why is it crucial for your growth.

What is Outbound Recruiting?

Organizations didn’t need to look beyond traditional approaches to finding and recruiting candidates for a long time. Talented and experienced people applying for roles posted on job boards, newspaper ads and online listings were more than normal. Recruiters had the power of picking candidates in an overcrowded market. People were looking for work without caring much about external factors like work culture, mode of working and the offered flexibility.

Things, however, have drastically transformed. It’s a candidate-driven market now. Recruiters are constantly facing challenges in hiring quality talent. Here’s where the outbound recruitment approach comes into the picture.

Outbound recruiting involves hiring actively by identifying and reaching out to candidates personally. Unlike the traditional inbound recruiting method, the outbound approach gives you entire control of your recruitment journey. So instead of waiting and spending hours on unproductive filtering of candidates – you are proactively offering the right people to join your organization. 

The outbound recruitment approach is similar to a cold pitch or a cold call. However, the recruiters do their research before targeting any candidate. This approach to hiring is far more beneficial (both in terms of resources and time) as compared to traditional inbound recruiting.

How do we claim that? Well in the case of outbound recruitment –  you are already connecting with qualified candidates as per your requirements. And you never rely on quality applications to grow your team and strengthen your business.

Why Outbound Recruitment is the Need of The Hour?

Enterprises now want to grow and scale up fast. The successful functioning and sustainability of any organization are largely driven by the talent and resources it possesses. So as recruiters, you are not running just a single race, but multiple ones against the competition, time and expectations. It’s more than enough to get overwhelmed, but the earlier you adapt to the shifting trends, the better you would be placed in the near future. 

Here are the top reasons why the outbound recruiting approach is crucial for recruiters and enterprises today:

1. You want to hire quality talent 

The primary reason why recruiters are striving is their need to find and hire quality talent. But how does sourcing candidates guarantee high-quality hire? Look at these statistics:

• 1 in every 72 sourced candidates gets successfully hired, against 1 in every 152 job applicants
• Passive candidates are 120% more likely to leave an impact on your organization
• Sourced talent is more than twice as efficient as those who apply.

2. Time is more precious than we think

Outbound recruiting immensely helps in saving time and resources as you don’t wait for weeks to get a few good applications, filtering out CVs and screening those candidates. The hiring cycle gets much longer in the case of inbound recruitment.
On the other hand, outbound sourcing and recruiting involve identifying the right candidates and directly screening them. This cuts off a lot of time consumed in hiring talent and helps in saving capital too. Using the outbound approach, you can scale up your recruitment processes as per required.

3. Predictable outcomes are luxury

You can have different approaches while executing outbound recruitment campaigns, but positive outcomes are ensured. Passive sourcing, which is a part of outbound recruitment helps recruiters unravel diverse talent pools and quality candidates in a much simpler way as compared to creating job posts and pushing on job boards. Additionally, outbound recruiting makes recruiters’ lives much easier and helps them strengthen their core skills to overcome any future challenges in hiring.

How to Execute Outbound Recruitment?

Only 25% of the overall candidates in the workforce are searching for jobs actively. A large chunk of talent is passive talent. So, in order to boost your recruitment – your hiring team will need to focus on passive sourcing.

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Source: LinkedIn Business

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We came across what outbound recruiting is and why is it crucially important for modern-day recruiters to sustain and grow their organizations successfully. Let’s now take a look at how to execute outbound recruiting for quality hiring campaigns. 

An ideal outbound recruiting strategy should focus on the candidates who are talented and are open to better and more impactful opportunities. That forms about 60% of the total workforce. So the outbound recruitment strategy is divided into two parts:

• Building a talent pool
• Connecting with the aim of conversion

Step 1: Building a Talent Pool

An important aspect of efficient hiring in modern times is having a talent pipeline full. The idea is to keep sourcing candidates and add the top-qualified ones to your talent pipeline. Hence, whenever candidates are required for an open role, you know where to go for a quick solution.

Prior to reaching out to candidates, developing a talent pool is a great investment of time and effort. It might feel a bit intimidating at the beginning, but here’s how you can optimize this step:

• Use LinkedIn as your primary sourcing platform but use role-specific platforms too. Example: Stackoverflow, Github for tech talent, ProductHunt for Product Managers, Behance for designers etc.

• Find contact details of your target candidates and store them in one place

Step 2: Reaching Out to Prospective Candidates 

Once you have your talent pool established, it’s time to connect with the candidates and pitch to them about the open roles at your organization. Here are some best practices you should follow to optimize this step of outbound recruiting:

• Personalize your emails: No one likes to open and read generic emails that are not personalized and are clearly sent out as carbon copies. Research about your target candidates and leverage it to give your email a personal touch so as to maximize your chances of getting a response.

• Avoid spamming them: Having your target prospects’ contact details like email, mobile number and WhatsApp number does not mean that you will reach out to them repeatedly. It’s a big red flag. 

• Follow up consistently: Following up with your target prospects in case you haven’t received a response in 2-3 days, helps you boost your response rate if you personalize your email well.

Use a Talent Sourcing Tool

As a recruiter, you want to focus on the core tasks of the hiring journey. However, with so many tasks starting from sourcing to managing the talent pipeline – doing everything manually can be daunting for you and can harm your productivity. To boost your outbound recruiting, it is recommended that you use an automated candidate sourcing tool like NurtureBox. As the future will be driven by passive talent, you need to consistently engage and reach out to candidates at scale. Our candidate sourcing tool enables automated outreach, candidate engagement and nurturing while managing your ATS and talent pipeline at the same time.
But how does NurtureBox work? We will find out more about this in the next section.

Top Strategies to Ensure You Hire Right via Outbound Recruiting

Think of outbound recruiting as your sales campaign or email marketing campaign. The only difference is - here you are trying to sell your job to candidates instead of products to target customers. Let’s uncover the top 5 strategies you need to follow for hiring better and more efficiently. 

#1 Source the Right Candidates and Add them to Your Campaign

The first and foremost parameter that will define the outcomes of outbound recruiting is the quality of candidates you source. The best way to go about it is to use LinkedIn to identify and handpick relevant target candidates.

What after you find out your prospective candidates? Use NurtureBox’s Chrome extension so that you can effectively manage your sourced candidates.

Use SIgnalHire plugin available with NurtureBox to find the contact details of your prospect through their LinkedIn profile.

Once you find their contact details, you can directly add the candidate to your campaign in order to engage further.

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#2 Personalize Your Entire Email 

It’s 2022 and sending the same email to every candidate doesn’t work at all. To boost your email open rate and response rate, personalizing your subject line as well as email content is crucial.

Please note that candidates are more likely to open your email if your name is written instead of the organization’s name.
The recruiting efforts are not just about delivering successful hires, but also about the candidate experience.
NurtureBox provides you with the option of creating templates so that you can instantly execute personalization at scale. 

#3 Engage with Them on Their Preferred Channels

Once you have sourced numerous candidates and prepared personalized emails, it’s time to begin engaging with the candidates. To further strengthen your relationship with your potential hire, engage with them on their preferred channels.
NurtureBox allows you to engage with added candidates through Whatsapp, Email and LinkedIn. Each update regarding their status of recruitment, expected timeline and upcoming events - interviews & scheduled meetings should be informed.

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#4 Analyze Your Performance Metrics and Refine the Processes

Data plays a huge role in refining your outbound recruitment with each iteration. Similar to data-driven marketing, you need to analyze what’s working the best and what’s not for you. For example - metrics defining the response to your outreach campaigns.

If you have got the NurtureBox Chrome extension installed already, performance insights and various other metrics can be accessed with a single click.
Once done, you can work on improving the corresponding parameters for the outbound recruiting campaign.

#5 Get the Right Tools

Getting the right set of recruitment support tools will exponentially boost your productivity. As you beat the manual hassle and focus on critical human-centric tasks, the quality of hire will surely improve. 

From contact finding tools like SignalHire to ATS integration using Recruitee and email engagement campaigns using Lemlist, NurtureBox has everything you will need for outbound sourcing and recruiting accessible through a single window. 

Summary

Traditional inbound recruiting methods are no more as effective as they used to be. While the demand for quality candidates is huge, outbound recruitment is impeccably growing. And there is no reason why it should not. Improved ROI, faster hires and most importantly - high-quality recruitment has been made possible through outbound recruiting. To cut down your manual efforts in managing talent pool and sourcing by around half, NurtureBox is a comprehensive solution that you’ll need. With integrated ATS management, email engagement sequences and automated outreach – our sourcing automation tool helps you hire top talent at scale.