We are living in the time right now known as The Great Resignation. About one-third of the workforce is estimated to leave their current roles within the next few months. People are realizing they can join another company and stay working in a remote environment while their current employer brings their workforce back on-site. Or these people can join another company and have better pay, better benefits. Or people are just leaving their current jobs with nothing else lined up, so they can focus on their mental health and put themselves first. When it is a candidate’s market, this makes things a lot harder for sourcers and recruiters.
Sure, we have more people looking for jobs, but right now people are not only being selective but they are having hundreds of us reaching out to them every week. This means, our InMails have to be creative, our email subject lines have to stand out, our salaries have to be competitive. And in a time like this, we start to run low on InMails and Indeed messages.
We have all been there before. Our messages on Indeed or LinkedIn are about to run out and won’t be refreshed for a week or two. We are working on high-volume reqs and need to message a lot of people to fill a lot of seats. And we’ve gotten comfortable with these tools. We see how much they work and we now need to figure out another solution.
Don’t worry! There are plenty of other things you can be doing. Whether you are new to recruiting and you only know these tools or you have been around for a while, by the time you finish reading this article – You will always know how to handle this dilemma in the future.
If you have run out of messages on Indeed, that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t use it anymore! Keep looking at your resume alerts, but look up the people on LinkedIn or open web and message them another way. Reverse search! Or use one of the many great People Search Engines to find their contact information. Or even look them up in your CRM or ATS! Indeed
When it comes to recently updated resumes, you want to be one of the first recruiters to message these people. Don’t wait for your messages to refresh or you will lose out on people that are actively looking. Run searches as you would, finish up the search from yesterday. Carry on, as you were.
Lastly, you can message Veterans for free. This is a great feature on Indeed. Run your normal searches, but select the filter for veterans. Then, message the prospects that fit your vacant roles. Not only is this a great way to save on some messages, but you can also hire veterans and help them transition into the work world!
It is far too often that people don’t think about their 1st-degree connections. Say you find yourself working on finance roles. Personal Banker, Bank Manager, Customer Service Rep. But you have never worked on these roles before. Heck, you have never worked in this industry before. So, there is no way you can be connected to any fitting people, right? Wrong!
You might have college alumni on there that could be a fit. Or old friends. Or people you met at a networking event. Or a third cousin who is in the industry and just so happens to be looking for something new. Work off of those 1st-degree connections!
The nice thing about 1st connections is that you can message as many of them for free or send them an email or give them a call. You know that their contact information is correct and that your outreach should at least be successfully reaching their Inbox or voicemail.
And just like we talked about with Indeed, if you are out of InMails, that doesn’t mean to hold off on running a normal search on LinkedIn Recruiter. Run your saved searches, check your alerts, look at people Open to new opportunities and then find another way to reach out to them. You can even send them a connection request and then reach out when they have accepted your request.
People Search Engines
We briefly discussed this above, but people search engines are a great way to reach out to people and not use up any messages. If you have Hiretual or SeekOut, you can use these resources to reveal contact information. If you don’t have one of these platforms, use a site like That’s Them or use the Gmail trick. In my opinion, 75% of people have a Gmail account that is in the format of firstname.lastname@gmail.com. As long as their name is not Will Smith, plug this in and send an email over to them.
There are plenty of Chrome extensions and other free, freemium, and paid services to use to find contact information. Check the archive of SourceCon articles for more!
CRM and ATS
This is a great time to use your CRM and ATS. Look within closed reqs. Look within open reqs. Run searches. Spend a whole week just following up with people who showed interest and then went dark. Look at silver medalists from closed reqs that have now reopened.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in these places. And the nice thing is that their contact information is in there. Which is another reason to always cross-reference people in these systems.
Other
When you find yourself in this scenario, this is also a great time to get used to sourcing out-of-the-box. Use open-web. X-ray a resume book. Scrape a conference list. Look for a niche job board/resume site and try it out for a month. Get creative. Spend a day researching what works best for your industry/roles that you are hiring for. Reach out to the Sourcing community in Facebook and LinkedIn groups and ask for their advice. Sign-up for Reddit and see what you can do find on there. Sometimes the best way to learn new things is to be put to a challenge like this.