If and when (let’s hope “when”) the economy regains a head of steam, many of us will experience a wave of relief…and a wave of regret. We’ll be relieved at the prospects of a more positive outlook, but we’ll regret missing an unprecedented opportunity (right now) to increase the breadth and depth of our relationships with prospective talent. Only 25% of employed individuals are maintaining a relationship with a recruiter outside their organization. And, while many of the applicants that we’re seeing right now may be unqualified for our current openings, chances are that a non-trivial number of them are qualified for our future openings. When the economy turns, let’s not find ourselves saying “if only we’d done a better job of capturing the contact details of applicants during the downturn.”
This is an exceedingly rare opportunity to build your candidate pipeline to meet future hiring needs. Ask: When the economy rebounds, will we be headed back to the job boards, or will we be able to blast an email about our newest opening to the pools of talent that we’ve captured during the downturn? Keeping relationships warm isn’t easy, but we’re finding that some firms have are taking advantage of scalable, interactive Web 2.0 tools (members only) to make this happen. This is still an embryonic field, but we can all learn from their example.
This is an exceedingly rare opportunity to build your candidate pipeline to meet future hiring needs. Ask: When the economy rebounds, will we be headed back to the job boards, or will we be able to blast an email about our newest opening to the pools of talent that we’ve captured during the downturn? Keeping relationships warm isn’t easy, but we’re finding that some firms have are taking advantage of scalable, interactive Web 2.0 tools (members only) to make this happen. This is still an embryonic field, but we can all learn from their example.
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