How to Research Passive Candidates
Audience identification is the first part of a passive candidate targeting strategy. (The subsequent stages are attracting, engaging, and converting passive candidates.)
Uncovering the personas and behaviours of a currently disengaged target audience may sound challenging, but it’s more straightforward than you’d think.
In fact, you can leverage your existing employees to take part in focus groups to understand what motivates others who might want to work for you.
It’s also important to look outside your organisation to make sure that your data doesn’t come from within an echo chamber, and that’s relatively simple, too.
You can, for instance, engage in keyword research to see how passive candidates seek out career related information online so that you can respond to such searches.
In this blog post, we’ll deep dive into these and other techniques for researching passive candidate characteristics and behaviours, and show you how the data they provide can be woven into employer brand messaging and content marketing strategies.
How to identify passive candidates using focus groups
Focus grouping people who already work for you to identify target candidates who aren’t yet aware of your employer brand might seem counterintuitive. They’re two entirely different audiences, aren’t they?
Actually, no.
Both are motivated to work for an organisation like yours. One has simply already been converted by your employer value proposition, while the other is yet to be engaged by it. So focus grouping employees to target passive candidates is simply a case of zeroing in on the qualities they share, namely their:
Preferences
What social media do they choose? What’s their preferred learning style? What formats do they like? Understanding employee preferences uncovers where to target passive candidates and with what kinds of media.
Ambitions
What do they want to do with their lives? Where do they want to do it? How quickly do they want to achieve their ambitions? Knowing what your employees want to achieve gives you broad topic information for passive candidate messaging and content, and starts to focus the strategy on aspects like rank and timeline, e.g., “how to become a store manager within 3 years.”
Purpose
Why do they do what they do? What are the little things that keep them going through the day? And what’s the big thing that’s at the heart of all the effort? Knowing what motivates your existing teams helps you understand how to reach passive candidates on an emotional, purpose-driven level, e.g., “make a positive impact on your community.”
Challenges
What’s stopping them from engaging in their preferences, achieving their goals, and fulfilling their sense of purpose? Knowing what your existing employees think about this tells you where you’re going wrong with current efforts to attract passive candidates, e.g., publishing content on the wrong platform, publishing the wrong kind of content, or promoting the wrong rewards and benefits.
To set up a focus group, ideally work with an external provider such as an employer branding agency. Citizens Advice UK suggests that external moderators help to maintain impartiality, which leads to more reliable data. This makes particular sense in a sensitive situation where saying “the wrong thing” could be perceived to have consequences such as angering the boss or, worse, losing one’s job.
Make sure to vet the agency thoroughly in advance to ensure the data they’ll provide will reveal the characteristics and behaviours you’re looking to explore. If in doubt, speak to a number of agencies first to assess the comprehensiveness of their approach to focus grouping. And even suggest inputting into the questions to ask employees if there’s very specific data you’re looking to uncover.
Focus groups should consist of at least 30% of the total population, should it number less than 1,000, to offer reliable representative data. For larger employee groups, a minimum of 10% of the total population is said to offer reliable representation.
How to use keyword research to identify passive candidates
Keyword research reveals two major aspects of passive candidate identity: their topic interests and their reasons for exploring those topics online (known as “search intent”).
The primary impact of keyword data is that it helps you to build content clusters that target passive candidate search interests. These clusters will enable you to plan an ongoing publishing schedule that grows your employer brand authority with passive candidates.
The secondary impact of keyword data is that it enables you to target not just by topic, but also by search intent. For instance, if a passive candidate is looking for “informational” content about a specific topic, this tells you that “how-to” guides such as “how to change a spark plug” (if you’re targeting entry level mechanics) will be an effective content format. If, on the other hand, a passive candidate is looking for “commercial” content, this tells you that statistics about your employer brand, such as your gender pay gap rating (if you’re targeting female professionals), will be effective.
Once you’ve engaged in keyword research to reveal these vital aspects of passive candidate personas, you’ll be able to leverage the keywords in any content you create, such as blog posts or whitepapers, off the back of the research. So that, when more people use the same search terms, they’re more likely to be served with your content on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
How to use surveys to identify passive candidates
A cost effective way of identifying the qualities and behaviours of passive candidates is to conduct surveys that reveal them. These can be done internally with existing employees, much in the way focus groups are carried out, or externally with passive audience segments at various stages of employer brand awareness.
The content of passive candidate research surveys will differ based on who you intend to participate.
Onboarding surveys of new employees are a great way to learn details of the average candidate content journey leading to joining your organisation (e.g., blog post > podcast > whitepaper > application). This can help you to shape the content of different platforms to match that journey for passive candidates.
You can use regular internal Pulse surveys, which are short questionnaires, to research things like changing topic priorities as your employer brand reputation improves. This will help you to adapt your passive candidate targeting strategy over time.
External passive candidate research surveys can be conducted with tools like SurveyMonkey to assess the development of things like brand awareness with questions such as “Describe what you know about [x] brand as a place to work in -30 words.”
SurveyMonkey offers built in participants of millions of people all over the world who can be targeted according to location, sector, job role, education, and age. So it’s also a great way of drilling down into segment preferences to support other data such as that uncovered by keyword research.
Just be mindful that, whatever types of surveys you choose, they do tend to offer limited depth of data in comparison to focus groups, which can be much more effective at collecting qualitative data. You can, however, collect a large volume of responses from surveys, so they’re great for quantitative data.
Building passive candidate personas from research data
As you can see, passive candidates aren’t quite hiding in the shadows waiting to be identified. Everything you need to know about them in order to target them is easily available to you with just a little strategic creativity. All you need to do once you’ve gathered this data is piece it together to build a detailed passive candidate persona, structured into preferences, ambitions, purpose, and challenges (also known as pain points).
A passive candidate persona is a kind of archetype based on the most common characteristics demonstrated by the people you research. You’ll give the persona a name and even an AI avatar. (Of course, you’ll have multiple different personas for the same roles just to show the diverse audience segments who can be targeted by those roles.) Planning employer brand content based on candidate personas helps content creators to be more authentic in their outputs, because they have a near-tangible passive candidate identity in mind as they create it.
Reveal the characteristics of your passive candidate audience starting now, and you’ll be much better equipped to focus your employer brand content strategy on niches that maximise engagement.