Solution Brief

Nurturing passive talent with Gem

We all know that sourcing and recruiting talent is a long game. With only 30% of talent actively looking for new opportunities at any given time, TA teams are turning to passive talent to fill their pipelines. But at Gem, we’re seeing that many recruiters aren’t following up after the initial outreach sequences they send to passive prospects—which means that after all that work to find them, they’re letting them go.

It’s worth remembering that it can take between 12 and 20 touchpoints to influence a career decision. By the time your initial outreach sequence in Gem ends, you’ve only had around 4 touchpoints with talent; so if recruiters don’t have a solution to pick up the thread for the 5th, 6th, and 7th touchpoint to maintain relationships with prospective candidates, they’re starting from scratch every time a new role opens.

While recruiters will, of course, receive some responses to their initial outreach (Gem’s data shows that a 4-stage sequence sees, on average, a 32% reply rate), there’s still a large share of the talent pool (68%) you won’t initially hear back from. There will be prospective candidates who don’t interact with your sequence at all; there will be some who open your emails or click into links but never respond. There will be some who reply but go dark when it comes to scheduling time for a phone screen. Another scenario our customers often see is one in which talent responds with some version of “not now, but maybe later.”

From a recruiter standpoint, all of these scenarios present a recollection problem: when the time comes to re-engage down the road—or the date rolls around that talent has asked the recruiter to be in touch again—the recruiter can’t remember the relevant context for that prospect. Did the prospect say “my shares vest in 4 months, so let’s chat then”? Or did they mention an upcoming promotion at the end of the year that they wanted to wait for? In many cases, the lack of a system for following up with qualified talent in a reliable, personal way results in that prospect being dropped and forgotten. That prospect is never to be re-engaged until someone else on your team stumbles upon the same LinkedIn profile after doing the same search sometime down the road, and has to start warming up that prospect from square 1 again.

Sequence Type Nurture

Gem’s Nurture feature allows recruiters to craft a message or a nurture sequence and schedule it to go out well past the initial outreach sequence, whether at a specific date and time (“July 17th at 7:35 AM”), or at a relative later time period (“in 6 months”).

Add to this other complicating factors, like what happens if the recruiter running a particular search is no longer with the company when it’s time to re-establish contact with that prospective candidate.

For all of these use cases, Gem has built-in talent re-engagement features that allow sourcers and recruiters to nurture candidates beyond the initial outreach sequence by searching their candidate database, mining them for candidates they’ve previously sequenced, and re-engaging with specific talent pools such as silver-medalists. Gem allows recruiters to set reminders, due dates, and add notes to candidates’ profiles so that candidates never slip through the cracks. We’ve also recently added some features that allow recruiters to easily set up a re-engagement sequence to go out in the future as soon as the initial outreach sequence ends.

“Nurturing is great behavior that I feel is overlooked in our industry. Gem has been a huge part of cultivating that for me. A lot of people send out three messages in their little drip campaign, and that’s it. But I believe wholeheartedly that this is a relationship whether they’re responding to you or not; you’ve got to keep cultivating it.”

Aaron Smith

Aaron Smith

Technical Sourcing Lead

Plaid | Customer Logo

Recruiting Top Talent is a Long Game

Recruiting Timeframe

Now, when recruiters are looking at that 42% of talent who opened their initial outreach sequence but never responded, or when a candidate responds with a “not now; maybe later,” recruiters can immediately personalize a nurture sequence and schedule it to go out for a later date, whether at a specific date and time (“July 17th at 7:35 AM”), or with a relative later time period (“in 6 months”). Relative later dates are automatically forwarded to the next working day, and the nurture sequence will be threaded with the initial email sequence to make the conversation, over time, appear seamless.

As with Gem’s outreach sequences, if a candidate contacts the recruiter in any email before the nurture sequence goes out, the sequence will be paused (though recruiters can override this and continue with the sequence if they choose).

Gem’s re-engagement and nurture features ensure sourcers and recruiters don’t drop prospective candidates and interested talent just because they’ve lost context. They give TA teams full visibility into candidate interactions, so new recruiters can pick up the thread where former recruiters left off. They also give TA teams those extra touchpoints with talent, increasing the chances those passive prospects eventually become applicants.

To learn more about how Gem can help your team, contact us here.

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