- Many organizations lose sight of top talent once they’ve been through the recruiting process, leaving qualified leads out of consideration for future roles or projects.
- Using the right tech is critical to your ability to resurface talent in your database and re-engage them with your organization.
- Providing meaningful value to top candidates, even if they aren’t hired, can make a good impression and keep them interested in future roles.
It’s every HR team’s worst nightmare: the graveyard of past candidates who could have been great.
But that graveyard doesn’t have to be a terrifying place to visit. In fact, with the right tech in place and a willingness to try new approaches, recruiters can find ways to resurface talent and hire workers with promising skills to join their organizations.
In the latest Talent Table, I talked with Hung Lee, Editor at Recruiting Brainfood, and Victoria Bombas, Director at PwC, about the best ways to bring talent back from the dead.
Related content: Watch the Talent Table webinar “Bring your talent back from the dead” on demand now.
Bring talent back to life with the right tech
This topic has been around for years—how do we connect with candidates who apply for positions, but don’t get hired?
It’s time-consuming to pull profiles out of static systems of record, hunt down updates, and then try to connect.
Technology has created a monster in how easy it is for people to apply for massive amounts of job openings. Many organizations aren’t prepared to handle the volume, and applicants are disappearing into the void.
In our discussion, we acknowledged that while tech got us here, it can also create solutions just as quickly as it can create challenges. One way is to use tech to rediscover the talent already in your database.
“The idea of the candidate as consumer and consumer marketing-led approaches to candidates is something that we’ve talked about in our industry for a long time,” Bombas said. “Segmentation and personalization are part of that, and we have so many more tools now to enable us to do that. I’m a big supporter of seeing who’s in that pool, what they want, and what they are up to—using the tools to work out what [the candidate’s] priorities are.”
Value: The treat your candidates seek
Several friends have shared how frustrating the job-search process has been in the last year.I can see why.
From a candidate’s perspective, many application processes appear to be filled with tricks—creating profiles, re-entering information several times, filling out additional forms, taking impersonal assessments, doing “homework.” Many times your information is being sent off into a black hole, never to be seen again.
Finding ways to give value back to your candidates—especially those who are a good fit for your organization—is essential to keeping them connected, even if they don’t get the job.
Talent intelligence platforms, powered by AI, make it simple to create communities for previous applicants. Communities can be segmented by areas including job titles, interests, location, or industry, and specialized communications can be sent out that are relevant to each of those groups.
This can also be done by understanding candidate and employee skills. Talent intelligence helps recruiters create a skills inventory and hire or promote workers based on their current skills, or focus on potential skills needed in the future.
“Sometimes people don’t even know what they want to do,” Bombas said. “This is where the interesting dimension of the skills-based approach is right because if you can identify or help identify people’s core skills, you can use the predictive ability we have to actually suggest things to them.”
Organizations can also provide value to candidates by giving some type of feedback after any request for additional information. Lee said candidates often feel applying for a job is an unfair exchange of energy. The candidate does all the work, and then all they receive is an automated decline without ever talking to a live person.
He suggested providing reports based on any assessments administered, an idea that I love.
“You don’t necessarily need to give them an outcome, but you deliver them some value back from the energy they put in,” Lee said. “Then suddenly people think, ‘OK, great—I’ve got something useful here in exchange for my effort.’ I think the UX innovations we’ve seen are actually very powerful and eliminate this sense of inequity that candidates inherently feel when they apply for jobs and then have to do assessments.”
Related content: Wondering how others are using AI to find new talent? Learn how Amdocs is filling critical roles with a new approach to talent acquisition.
It’s alive: How to use AI in HR
As organizations adopt AI in HR, the monstrous challenge they all face is understanding the human workload versus the AI workload. What belongs where?
This question can be overwhelming to answer for HR teams feeling under-resourced and overcapacity. Still, their valuable time needs to be invested in understanding and setting up new technology and developing new processes.
It’s not just HR teams who need to be sold on using AI—HR needs to sell it to the business.
“We’ve got to accept the temporary slowdown of efficiency because there’s always going to be switching costs,” Lee said. “CEOs should understand that they’re business people, they understand what it means to change a system. I think we, as a function, have to find the courage to have that conversation.”
He adds that recruiting teams are best poised to introduce AI into the conversation and make it operational by examining it as a way to improve efficiency.
“We need to … think about time saved and then converting and recycling that time saved back to further optimization and other activities which may not be focused on productivity,” he said.
Using AI in HR to take over those repeatable, time-consuming tasks allows teams to focus on strategic work that directly connects to organizational success.
Bombas agreed that now is the time to connect business objectives and HR’s ability to impact those goals, citing PwC’s Annual Global CEO Survey, which showed that more than half of CEOs listed a skills and labor shortage as one of their top three threats to their businesses in 2024.
“It’s not TA’s problem or HR’s problem—it’s the business’ problem,” she said. “It’s really about looking at that candidate graveyard and all these methods and techniques to help people on their career paths and give them jobs they’ll be good at and love.”
Watch the Talent Table webinar “Bring your talent back from the dead” on demand now.
