QSR leaders devote a large amount of time and resources to recruiting active job seekers both online and in their brick-and-mortar restaurants. However, hiring managers often overlook the potential of reaching out to passive job seekers.
Many passive job candidates are happily employed. Why would they want to make a career change right now?
Even though trying to recruit passive candidates may seem like a waste of time, the opposite is actually true. Passive job seekers can be some of the best candidates for your brand because they are more likely to be good employees by virtue of the fact that they’re currently employed.
The tricky part is knowing how to best attract passive job seekers and get them interested in working for your store. In today’s post, we discuss five strategies you can use to attract those seemingly elusive passive job seekers.
Restaurants are increasingly turning to social media platforms to attract passive job seekers. That’s because these platforms allow you to reach large audiences in efficient ways. In fact, Chipotle recently used TikTok to attract passive candidates—and it paid off.
You can use Twitter's advanced search functionality to scan user profiles for relevant keywords and hashtags. For example, if you're hiring for a district manager (DM) position, you can search Twitter for specific QSR management keywords within your brand’s targeted region. These search results can uncover general managers (GMs) and DMs who share branded content from their current employer on Twitter. Plus, this Twitter activity provides evidence that they're engaged and enthusiastic about their career, which bodes well for their candidacy with your brand.
Facebook is another valuable social media platform you can use to find passive job seekers. You can use Facebook’s advanced targeting capabilities to promote career opportunity content to relevant crew member audiences. Facebook provides a wide range of targeting options for this content including geographic, sociographic and interest targeting. Plus, potential crew members don’t usually receive Facebook content from recruiters, so they may be more likely to respond because of the novelty aspect of the engagement.
In addition to TikTok, Twitter and Facebook, you should also be using other social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and LinkedIn (especially for vice president of operations and manager positions). As a hiring manager, you can use these platforms uniquely to reach passive job seekers. You can even get creative and send sponsored Snapchats or Instagram stories that let passive candidates know about the amazing opportunities available.
Ground-breaking automated hiring technology has been a game-changer for QSR recruiting. Hiring managers can now use artificial intelligence (AI) to more efficiently find passive job seekers as compared with using manual methods. In many cases, digital platforms use algorithms to predict the future success of hires better than humans.
AI automatically scans the internet to harvest valuable data on passive candidates including resume information and social media activity. Based on this data, automated hiring platforms can predict which job seekers are most likely to be open to switching jobs, allowing you to place a higher priority on those candidates.
Current employees can be your best source of future talent. Most of your employees have their own personal networks in the community. These networks often have passive job seekers who would be a great match for open roles at your restaurants. While passive job seekers might be reluctant to respond to recruiters, they are far more likely to respond to opportunities they hear about from a friend or family member.
Put a robust referral program into place that adequately incentivizes current employees to help recruit their friends and family members. Doing so will enable you to source more passive and better candidates because of their connection to current employees.
Many active job seekers use job boards such as Indeed and Monster.com to find their next career opportunity. In fact, our customers here at Workstream are able to post jobs to 25,000 job boards with a single click.
While job boards are great for connecting with active job seekers, many QSRs don’t realize their potential use for passive job seekers as well. The reason is that candidates upload their resumes to job boards during their active search, but those resumes are oftentimes retained in their job board profiles long after they’ve accepted new jobs.
This gives savvy hiring managers a great way to tap into passive job candidate pools. You can do this by searching these job boards based on many different data points such as industry, experience, skills and education level. When viable passive candidates show up in these search results, you can reach out to them and turn them into active candidates for your restaurant.
Since passive job seekers aren’t looking for a new job, simply telling them about the roles and responsibilities of the position is not an effective strategy. You must emphasize their brand’s culture and ability to develop talent. If you’re serious about engaging passive candidates, make it clear why your restaurant’s culture is unique and how it could positively impact their life.
In fact, 87% of millennials say career development is important, and approximately 80% want a culture fit with company’s before they further consider a potential job. To motivate a passive job seeker to leave their current job, you need to help them buy into the idea that a new culture can better develop their career. If a passive candidate doesn’t think that your culture is significantly better than their current employer’s culture, they are less likely to engage with your outreach.
At Workstream, we provide QSRs with digital hiring solutions that help them consistently source passive job seekers for their restaurants. Our next-generation hiring platform automates the hiring process, which allows GMs and QSR leaders to focus on growing their business and securing their pipelines of future talent.
If you’re ready to start attracting more passive job seekers to your restaurants, book a free demo with one of our hiring specialists today!