Your business has grown and its time to grow your staff. You need to staff more people for some of the same positions in your business, so you post your job to attract candidates. 

Usually, there’s a waiting period between when you post your job and when you start receiving quality candidates. Sometimes that period is short, if you’re hiring for a less specialized position, but sometimes that period can be very, very long.

How do you stay productive during that waiting period to still hire fast?

Start remarketing to applicants.

Remember that you should treat applicants like sales leads. And just like you run a remarketing campaign for sales leads or previous customers, you can also remarket to applicants.

How Do I Start Remarketing to Applicants?

You can start remarketing to applicants by making a list of applicants that have applied to the position you’re hiring for previously. Do this either through an excel spreadsheet or even better yet, your applicant tracking software (ATS). CareerPlug clients who might have made an applicant inactive due to lack of fit can reactive those applicants and put them back in their talent pipeline.

Once you pool together your previous applicants, it’s time to start figuring out who’s worthy of that candidate status. Identify any applicants that meet the skill sets you need. Keep the ones who meet the skill set and mark the other ones as inactive. 

If you brought in any of these applicants for a phone interview, an in-person interview, or just had them complete any sort of assessment, make sure you look through those notes as well before making a decision to keep them.

Finally, its time to start reaching out to your new candidates. This can sometimes be daunting because you might have established some sort of relationship between the candidate previously. If they interviewed for you, they might still bear some feelings of disappointment for being rejected.

So, what do you communicate to your new candidates to make them reconsider joining your growing company?

How to Convert Rejected Applicants Back to Candidates

When converting rejected applicants back to candidates, it’s important to focus on the good rather than the bad. Some of these rejected applicants may have spoken or met with you previously.

The conversation you need to have with these new candidates has to be around why you think they would be a good fit for the position now. This time, you need to sell them on why they should work with you rather than the candidate doing the selling.

Here are some ideas to include in your messaging to your new candidates.

Strengths: Take some time to talk to your new candidates about their strengths in relation to why you are considering them for this position. You can use their resume and notes from interviews to find these.

Areas for Opportunity: Think of 3-5 areas in which the candidate can positively impact the business. They can be either business-related items (ex. able to share industry knowledge) or non-business related items (ex. culture fit).

Career Path Desires: The best candidates want to continuously develop professionally. Make sure you are on the same page with these candidates on how your job fits in with their career path. If they don’t see a way to grow or you can’t offer growth, it’s important to be aware of this. Considering career path alignment could save you from employee turnover.

Desired Salary: This is probably the most important conversation you will have with a candidate. If their desired salary is not in line with what you’re offering, it will be hard to get a signed offer letter from a candidate. Have this conversation early so you can see which candidates align with the salary you will offer.

What Should I Use to Communicate with New Candidates?

There are a number of different channels you can use to remarket to applicants. The channel you use should be based on how quickly you need to hire and how much rapport you have built with these candidates.

Similar to and remarketing and retargeting campaigns you might run with your sales leads, you can use email, phone, and social media.

Here is a list of channels you should use based on how you communicated with the applicant previously.

Email – for the applicant you haven’t communicated with

Email can be great for reaching out to candidates in bulk. Use this for reaching out to applicants that you haven’t interacted with. We recommend creating an email template that you can use for rejected applicants that you are now considering. An ATS can save you time here by saving templates for quick access.

Phone – for applicants you have communicated with

Giving new candidates a call is a great way to build on the rapport you have might have established with them during a phone or in-person interview. We recommend reaching out via email beforehand to set up a call.

Retargeted Ads – for both when you need to hire quick

For most companies, the first two options should work perfectly well. If you are really in a pinch for hiring and are willing to put money behind remarketing, consider also displaying ads via Facebook and LinkedIn to candidates.

You can remarket to applicants by adding them to a custom audience to send them ads. To do this, you need to create an ad campaign and upload a list of emails of applicants.

LinkedIn Messages – for applicants you have communicated with

If you can’t set aside time to make a phone call, try reaching out via LinkedIn. It can be a little more personal than email and can give you a better chance of having your message seen.