There has been so much coverage on the Great Resignation and so much hype around ‘insane salaries’ candidates are landing. Not coincidentally, social media feeds are also cluttered with Founders promoting the "building of their brand" or newly published books in an attempt to win over talent.
But there is another side to this hot market. A whole other community of employees who aren't "open to opportunities", those who are actually content with what they earn and focused on doing their job.
In our industry, we broadly call this group of employees the "passive candidate" market – but some are so passive we can frankly call them "the uninterested".
Passive vs Uninterested
This uninterested is often the overachieving group and the dream hire of many of our clients. So how does an employer access this uninterested community of talent? It requires strategic, continual, low-pressure engagement - often over a long period of time.
For firms with larger internal recruiting teams, this is sometimes possible. But if you are like most companies with internal recruiters, who are too busy trying to fill the "100 urgent roles" then this long game-focused approach is nearly impossible.
The other challenge employers have when trying to attract the uninterested, is that a cold outreach puts the candidate in a position of making assumptions based on who the employer is, even if the employer is hiring for an innovation that is outside of their core business.
If they determine it isn’t a match and stay uninterested in engaging with you based on these assumptions, then you are in for an uphill candidate battle.
But there is another way.
Uninterested and Passive Candidate Recruitment
Before the market was as crazy as it is today, we wrote about recruiting passive candidates and how our engaged partnership model adds the greatest value to growth companies who need mission-critical hires across Product, Marketing, and Sales. This is especially when it comes to recruiting the uninterested.
Unlike your internal talent acquisition team, all of our focus is placed on finding these mission-critical and leadership candidate profiles. Our team has the bandwidth to apply a targeted slower approach. Our recruiters become an extension of your marketing message, advocating for your business and the opportunities which your growth plans could provide to the candidate's career goals.
Despite a great resignation, there is still a war to win over the top of the talent pyramid and a niche recruitment firm can help get you there.