Your business put out an advert for a recent job vacancy. It attracted many candidates and you received plenty of applications, but only one person could ever fill the role. One person gets hired, yet you still have the details of dozens – maybe even hundreds – of potential candidates.
By instinct, you want to discard their details; they weren’t good enough for the role, so why hang onto them? You’ll soon see why, as this blog explains the benefits of retaining candidate details even when they don’t get the job you advertised.
Start Building a Candidate Database
The hundreds of candidates who don’t get picked for your jobs could still be talented individuals. Moreover, they might be looking for work in the future, so it’s advantageous to have their details on record. It lets you slowly start building a candidate database full of prospects. You know a lot about each individual as the database can include their resumes as well as any application forms they filled in in the past.
Effectively, you’ve started nurturing your own talent pool. You’ve got a database full of candidates who are interested in working for your company and may possess the necessary skills to get a job here. The reason they didn’t get hired may have nothing to do with their competency. Yes, you will have candidates who simply aren’t qualified or experienced for the job they applied for – but most of them are. They lost out due to another candidate’s brilliance rather than their lack of brilliance.
As such, it’s useful to have a database full of talented people to call upon when you hire for new roles in the future – which brings us nicely to the second point.
Easily Identify Potential Candidates for Future Roles
Let’s say you’re looking to expand your small business and bring on more employees. Some new roles open up and you’re eager to bring in the most talented individuals you can find. It’s useful to still advertise the roles as normal, but having a candidate database supercharges the hiring process.
Nowadays, you can use all sorts of tools to quickly pick out the right people for proposed jobs. There are many ways to use AI in recruitment, and this is one of them. AI models can look at your main points – experience, skills, etc. – and find candidates in your database. You’re instantly presented with suitable candidates for each of the roles and can get in touch with them about applying for the job.
At the same time, you advertise the position to try and capture more talent. Perhaps one of the new people applying for the job advert is the one you choose. This means all the other new applicants become part of your database, giving you an even bigger talent pool to scour in the future. Or – and this happens a lot – you look through your database and some of the previous candidates get highlighted and they end up getting the job. You never know, they might not have seen your job advert this time, so being able to reach out and inform them of the position is extremely beneficial.
Save Money & Speed Up the Hiring Process
This all contributes to a more refined hiring process for your business. Having a database and being able to search for eligible candidates could mean you skip many stages of the traditional hiring procedure. You’ve already got these people’s resumes, and they already filled in application forms for jobs in the past. You know so much about them that you can automatically invite them for an interview, saving so much time and money.
Or, in some cases, you remember a candidate so well from a previous job interview that you wish to hire them for a new job without advertising it elsewhere. They were very close to getting the old role, so you know they’ll be a great fit for your company. Instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars advertising a job, sorting through candidates, planning interviews, conducting interviews, and everything else in between, you simply call or email the person and give them a job offer.
None of this is possible if you don’t retain candidate details. Start thinking about the long-term success of your business. Were they right for the initial role? No, someone beat them to it. But holding onto their details means you have access to someone who could be right for future roles and streamlines your hiring process, reducing onboarding costs while helping you find the best talent around.
