Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
Exceptional prospects often demand an extended trust relationship with a recruiter. So, top recruiters maintain an ongoing talent pipeline for their currently non-job-seeking top prospects. That talent pipeline gives busy recruiters more time to build engagement and trust relationships until individual pipeline members are ready to consider your open jobs.
Fortunately, there are three quick, no-cost actions that can help a recruiter remain fully engaged with their pipeline members. Each method is purposely subtle, ensuring the recruiter doesn’t come across as pushy or solely focused on making a placement. The first two recommended subtle engagement actions include sending birthday wishes and acknowledging work anniversaries. While the third is personalizing your messaging so they feel like they are receiving special personalized information and treatment.
1) A “Best Wishes Birthday Note” Will Build Their Engagement
Of course, everyone has a birthday. However, even those who don’t celebrate their birthdays with parties usually still notice it when people who they didn’t expect to send them a best wishes note, actually do. Birthday notes are an effective prospect engagement tool that is unlikely to fail. Provided that your birthday note doesn’t include even a hint of a recruiting pitch.
The first recruiting benefit from these notes is that they remind your recruiting prospect that their recruiter is thinking about them, even though there are no current job opportunities. Another recruiter benefit is that these birthday notes give you an opportunity to contact their prospects outside of the normal busy recruiting season. And if you title your birthday message correctly, so that spam filters don’t intercept it, there is a high probability that your message will be read, remembered, and even responded to.
Incidentally, the month with the most US birthdays is August.
Another recruiter benefit is that automated birthday messages are easy to send. Because there are a variety of free automated birthday message apps (including Gmail), and it’s also relatively easy to identify someone’s birthday.
A member’s birth date is often revealed in the “about me” section of their social media sites. You can also identify birthdays by searching the person’s social media stream for their birthday celebration posts. You should also be aware that there are numerous free and paid people-finding sites that use public records to identify anyone’s birthday. Using an AI-powered search app for their birthdate is always a viable option.
Incidentally, if the recipient does respond to your message, you must avoid including anything directly related to recruiting in your response. And instead, subtly suggest that maybe you two should connect again soon.
2) Sending A “Congratulatory Work Anniversary Note” Will Keep Them Engaged
Of course, all employee prospects have work anniversaries, though many don’t notice when they occur. For recruiters, that anniversary date should be considered extremely powerful. Groundbreaking research revealed that most employees quit their jobs within a few months of their work anniversary. This means anything that reminds an employee they’ve completed another year (Congrats, you’ve been at XYZ for 4 straight years) will likely trigger reflection about whether they want to spend another year in this job and company.
It is, however, critical that the content of your note be limited to congratulations. A note that appears to be a recruiting message intended to put pressure on your target to leave may cause the recruiter to come across as someone who doesn’t have the employee’s best interest at heart. So, I urge everyone to take advantage of a prospect’s anniversary date. Because a work anniversary is an ideal time to reflect on one’s past and, more importantly, one’s future.
Anniversary congratulations notes are an effective, subtle prospect engagement-building tool. Each anniversary date gives the recruiter one additional chance to contact their recruiting prospect on a neutral, non-recruiting topic. You can learn a prospect’s starting date at their current company from their resume or in the experience section of their LinkedIn profile.
Alternatively, you can learn it through their social media posts that reveal previous work anniversaries. Incidentally, you can track any positive career changes in their LinkedIn profile or by using AI. If you do, you will then build your engagement by periodically sending them congratulatory notes covering other recent career and life accomplishments.
3) Hyper-Personalizing Their Communications Will Keep A Talent Pipeline Member Engaged
It may seem minor, but if you were a top recruiting prospect in a hot area like AI, you’d certainly consider yourself unique and worthy of personalized treatment. This means when you received any standard templated communications, you might not pay any attention to the content in that message. Obviously, the content of the message was scripted so that it would fit the average recruiting target (and not you). So, if you wanted to keep a prospect fully engaged, you would make sure that all of your communications with them were sculpted around their needs and expectations.
The goal of hyper-personalizing your written communications to a talent pipeline member is to ensure that each prospect feels like that message was written from scratch, precisely with them in mind. This means turning off all AI-generated messages.
The areas of the message that need to be personalized include the names used (never start with the introductory line “Dear team member”). And of course, the content of the message, where they go for help, and any offered advice would have to be personalized to the needs and the expectations of this recruiting target.
Finally, all important messages must be pretested to ensure they meet your company’s personalization standard. This level of personalization takes time, but the results generated by the personalization would make it more than worthwhile.
Note: You can learn many more details about candidate-centric personalized communications and recruiting here.
Final Thoughts
In today’s ever-changing and resource-restricted world of recruiting. Every recruiter is constantly looking for WOW solutions that will dramatically improve their recruiting results. However, in the absence of these WOW solutions, even the best recruiters may have to settle for actions that provide incremental improvements.
And one of the incremental improvement areas that cries out for change is actions that improve the engagement levels of the high-value members of your talent pipeline.
Unfortunately, I find that it’s quite common to let the members of a talent pipeline languish without much attention when they should be kept fully informed, excited, and fully engaged.
So, I suggest that you follow my advice and take a few minutes to proactively build up engagement levels of your pipeline members with the use of birthday and work anniversary messaging. And by mass personalizing all of the written communications that you send to all of your most highly valued prospects. Because I promise you that these minor action steps will still make a noticeable difference!
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Note for the reader
This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
