What is Outbound Recruiting? Source, Engage, and Hire Top Talent in 2024?

For years, companies have been relying on inbound recruiting methods to find the desired candidates. But the times have changed! The job market is flipped, and the number of qualified candidates is reducing while job vacancies are increasing. According to a report by ManpowerGroup, 75% of employers are not able to find and fill for job vacancies with qualified candidates 2006. Even with mass layoffs, companies are hiring for various roles and need help to hire top candidates.

But what is the real challenge with inbound recruitment?

• Limited candidates 
• Losing top talent to competitors 
• Increasing unqualified applicants
• Lack Diversity 
• Lengthy and delayed recruitment
• Ambiguous targeting
• Can’t fill new and emerging roles

Solution? 

Outbound Recruitment!

Today’s blog will cover the ultimate solution to innumerable recruitment challenges- “outbound recruiting”. We will discuss types of outbound recruiting and how you can implement them as the core strategy.

What is Outbound Recruiting? 

Outbound recruiting means reaching out to targeted candidates for building a qualified internal team. It is a proactive approach where recruiters are actively sourcing, engaging, and hiring top talents in the industry. 

This technique is apt for hiring candidates for:

• Filling vacancies for emerging job roles, like customer success manager
• Finding a specific skill set, like a product marketing manager
• Strengthening the talent pool with diverse candidates 
• Targeting particular types of candidates, especially passive job seekers

Recruiters can use dedicated tools to automate a big chunk of the process and hire effortlessly! It is the long-term strategy to build a robust talent pool and fill vacancies seamlessly. The aim is to engage and attract qualified candidates till the vacancy arises.

What Are The Types Of Outbound Recruitment? 

Outbound recruitment comes in three different channels. A recruiter can deploy various strategies to find qualified candidates, but all these tactics fall under three major categories:

• Cold Calling
• Cold Emailing
• Social Media Outreach

All these channels aim to find qualified candidates and engage with them to build interest in the company. 

Cold Calling 

Cold calling is reaching out to prospective candidates without any prior interaction to create awareness. The recruiter creates a list of qualified candidates from various sources and reaches out to them, sharing relevant details about the vacancy. The aim is to pique the interest in the company and job role. 

Cold Emailing

Cold emailing is another alternative to cold calling, where recruiters reach out to desired candidates via email with no prior connection. They create a list of prospects and draft a short message to share relevant information with hundreds of potential candidates. It generally also includes the personalization element, where recruiters employ tools to implement and track specific email campaigns. 

Social Media Outreach 

Social media outreach is a recruitment strategy where recruiters use social media platforms to source and engage with qualified candidates. They use platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to find desired candidates and reach out to them to create awareness. It is one of the most effective ways to tap passive candidates, which account for 73% of the candidate market. 

Why Is Outbound Recruitment Crucial In 2024? 

Inbound recruiting means posting job vacancies, waiting for applicants, vetting, interviewing, and finally hiring the right candidate. This method is lengthy and leads to delayed hiring decisions. Result?

Inbound recruiting needs better conversion rates, low job acceptance rates, and higher time-to-fill vacancies. On the other hand, outbound recruiting has a positive impact on the hiring process and business growth. How? Here are the top 6 reasons why your business must start outbound recruiting:

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Scalable Recruitment Strategy 

Fundamentally, outbound recruiting starts by forecasting needs and planning the job role vacancies before the outreach begins. This means recruiters have clarity over the business hiring needs and can scale the hiring strategy based on long-term goals. The recruiters can contact candidates in bulk and conduct mass interviews to tap a larger candidate pool. 

This approach is apt for mass layoffs or slow hiring season because recruiters get access to qualified candidates without hiring them all immediately. Moreover, they have greater control over the hiring process. How?

For instance, the recruitment team is forecasting the needs of technical experts in the coming 4-5 months, gradually over the period. The recruiters can start sourcing candidates now to save time to fill and tap top talents effortlessly.

Targeted Approach 

Inbound recruiting means posting job vacancies and being flooded with qualified and unqualified applicants. Mostly, companies get a big chunk of unqualified candidates leading to resource wastage. 

Outbound recruiting ensures that recruiters target the specific candidate required, without spending a lot of resources. Moreover, instead of waiting for the right candidate to show up, recruiters actively source candidates.  This ensures a healthy talent pool, including passive and diverse candidates. 

The recruiter can leverage outbound recruiting for finding candidates for specific job roles, especially hard-to-fill positions. Moreover, they get more control over the candidate's quality. 

Faster Hiring 

Outbound recruiting helps recruiters get away with screening and vetting candidates since they spend their time sourcing qualified candidates in the first place. Inbound does invite a lot of resource expenditure on interview and filtering applications. However, outbound saves money and time spent on screening candidates. It helps the business by:

• Reducing time-to-fill to ensure that a job position is not empty for long. 
• Saving the internal team from the burden of taking over extra work of the vacant position
• Mitigating harm to employer brand caused by the long hiring process

Boost Employer Brand 

Inbound recruitment demands recruiters to work on their employer brand to attract qualified candidates. While employer brand plays an equally important role in outbound recruiting, outbound recruitment itself facilitates employer brand. How?

Recruiters source and engage with qualified candidates in outbound recruiting. They share relevant information and resources to pique their interest and build rapport. Result? The candidates have a better perception of the company as a whole. 

Recruiters spend weeks and months building relationships with top candidates and getting them to fill the vacancy when required!

Ensure Business Performance 

Outbound recruiting provides recruiters with top candidates and greater control over their hiring process. This ensures the company builds a strong qualified team, leading to enhanced business productivity. 

How does that help?

• Business operations will never disrupt due to a lack of manpower
• No operations will delay due to vacancy keeping additional expenses out of the way
• A qualified team ensures customer satisfaction and business growth

Inbound recruitment can negatively impact business operations and increase the risk of business downfall. Outbound recruiting means more control over the candidate hiring process.

Create Edge Over Competitor 

What if you lose top candidates to your competitors? 

Inbound recruiting means waiting for the right candidate to walk up to you! Chances of success? Low. Except if you are a big company with a good employer brand, it is difficult to attract top candidates.

Outbound recruiting helps tackle this issue since you target specific candidates per your needs, beating all the competitors to get talented candidates. You aim at passive job seekers, underrepresented candidates, and other talented candidates. Result? You build a competitive workforce and create an edge over competitors.

Implementing Outbound Recruiting As A Key Strategy

Your business need not completely depend upon outbound recruiting for hiring needs. It is a great way to tap talented candidates and can be mixed with inbound recruiting. Hence, businesses should use it as the key strategy and deploy a multi-channel recruitment process. Below are the top 4 reasons companies are increasingly interested in outbound recruiting.

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1. Unavailability of Qualified Applicants

It is hard to tap talented candidates via inbound with many unqualified applicants. Outbound recruiting helps solve this problem since recruiters get to choose the desired qualified candidates with specific skill sets. Recruiters can spend their time finding the right candidates for the job role and reach out to them. They can also perform a stringent background check and target a specific talent group.

2. Lengthy Hiring Process

More so than often, businesses have a lengthy hiring process with no optimization and many inefficiencies. Outbound recruiting gives recruiters more control since they have more planning and forecasting ahead. Moreover, the vetting process cuts short since recruiters get to hand-pick candidates per their needs and job requirements. This mitigates any delays leading to faster hiring. 

3. Focusing on DEI Efforts‍

Outbound recruiting allows recruiters to target desired candidates, which means they can focus on underrepresented candidates. This will enable them to build a diverse workforce and embrace diversity, equity and inclusion. They could additionally opt for blind hiring techniques to mitigate any bias and give equal opportunity to all qualified candidates. 

4. Dynamic Candidate Market

The recruitment market is dynamic and goes through trends and updates almost every day. Result? Recruiters can not rely on traditional or passive hiring strategies. They need to explore the market thoroughly and tap all the qualified candidates to build a competitive workforce. Inbound recruiting means missing out on a whole lot of talented candidates. So, opting for a multi-channel recruitment approach and hiring desired candidates is better. 

How to use Outbound Recruiting?   

Source 

Finding the right candidate for a job role is getting more difficult daily! Recruiters spend hours trying to tap talented candidates and strengthen their talent pool and workforce. Solution? A simple three-step process to outbound recruiting: source, engage, and hire. 

Build Talent Pool 

Have a dry talent pool? Tired of getting unqualified applicants to your job postings? Want to tap qualified talent and create a competitive workforce?

• Start by understanding the job role vacancy and the skill set required. This will involve the creation of an ICP (ideal candidate profile), aka candidate persona. It helps to target a specific candidate and improve hiring success. 

• Now pick the desired platform to source candidates. The engagement platforms must be chosen based on the candidate preference and results generated over past campaigns. This can include channels such as- LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Referrals, ATS, Indeed, etc. 

•  Automate this process of sourcing candidates by opting for tools like Nurturebox to build prospect lists easily within a few clicks. It is easy to build a candidate list with Nurturebox. You download the plugin and start sourcing candidates from the desired platform. With a few clicks, the desired candidate will automatically move to a common database with all the relevant information.

Engage

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Many recruiters cannot engage well, especially when it comes to cold outreach, be it on email or social media. The top 3 tips to increase cold outreach success are:

1. Personalize your message and build a relationship with the candidate instead of just trying to fulfill your purpose 
2. Follow up with the candidates regularly to leave no stone unturned and ensure maximum engagement
3. Track what’s working and what is not to get away with stagnant growth and ensure maximum ROI

Finally, remember to leverage tools for automation. You want to set a multi-channel approach while engaging to enhance response rate and campaign efficiency. Some of the ways a tool could help you with cold outreach are:

• Create specific campaign
• Engage on multiple platforms
• Resolve queries instantly 

Hire Top Talent

The final step is to leverage your healthy talent pool to hire talented candidates!

Pick the desired candidates from the talent pool and start working on the qualifying process. You could deploy tools for vetting and screening processes and conduct blind interviews to ensure no bias. 

With outbound recruiting, finding the right talent becomes easy. You can focus solely on high-value tasks instead of waiting for the right candidate to appear!

The Ultimate Tool For Automating Your Outbound Recruitment In 2024: Nurturebox  

Nurturebox is a talent engagement platform that helps recruiters automate sourcing and engaging with qualified candidates. It enables the recruiters to adopt a multi-channel hiring strategy so they focus solely on high-value candidates and tasks instead of being stuck with unqualified candidates and admin jobs. 

How do we help?

• Fill ATS with top-qualified candidates
• Find qualified candidates from LinkedIn, Naukri.com, and other sources
• Engage across multiple platforms- email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, SMS
• Track the progress and optimize the hiring process 

Scale your pipeline effortlessly by integrating our tool with your hiring tech stack, consisting of tools such as Recruitee, Lemlist, Improver, GreenHouse, etc. 

Download our extension today and get started with hiring the top candidates seamlessly!