Is outbound recruitment the future of hiring?
hireEZ believes so!
Why You Should Care
The 'Great Resignation' has proved that recruitment is broken.
Find out why employers need to be more proactive about recruitment.
Check out how hireEZ wants to help.
Outbound marketing and sales are key to how businesses make money. Through events like tradeshows, as well as calling and emailing existing and potential clients, marketing and sales teams get leads and transform these into revenue.
This approach is active; they don’t wait for potential customers to come to them for business opportunities, they go out and search for the business themselves.
However, this doesn’t mean that inbound marketing – where teams create content or social media strategy to spread brand awareness – has no place in business strategies. But this more passive approach usually cannot be relied upon alone to garner enough business to keep companies afloat and thriving.
Unfortunately, companies have for many years and decades relied too much on the passive approach to attract and recruit new talent. They put a job advert out on platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn, or SmartRecruiters and then wait for candidates to apply for the job.
More active recruitment, such as headhunting, has always played a role in recruiting, but often for more senior roles and in certain sectors like private equity and consulting.
It seems like recruitment has, therefore, got the balance between active and passive hiring wrong. Is it time that recruitment switches things up and embraces a more proactive approach?
A new hiring category: outbound recruitment
In the current challenging labor market – dubbed the ‘Great Resignation’ – it became clear to artificial intelligence sourcing tech company Hiretual (now called hireEZ) that the passive approach to recruitment is broken. “Today’s labor market is a big headache for CEOs; recruiters need to be more active”, CEO Steven Jiang tells UNLEASH.
Steven Jiang, co-founder and CEO, hireEZ.
Jiang adds “we thought that sourcing might go down [during the pandemic] as people wouldn’t hire, but that was wrong”. So hireEZ started to talk to its customers and users to try and understand the reality of hiring and recruitment in the pandemic.
“We saw higher sourcing activity, but also many users [were] going beyond sourcing” – they were also engaging with candidates better, as well as integrating with other tech tools and platforms, especially applicant tracking systems (ATS).
hireEZ decided that sourcing was too narrow a category for this breadth of activity – this was especially since its clients “kept asking for more features” from the company’s platform, and particularly those that helped with the more active approach to hiring.
Then one night Jiang was inspired by outbound marketing and sales and so “came up with outbound recruiting”; “it is not difficult for people to understand” and when he shared it with the hireEZ team and clients, “they loved it”.
The idea is to “go back to basics” and help recruiters be “more proactive, more productive and more efficient”. It transforms recruiters from passively sifting through CVs into “the best sales reps” around the company’s values, mission, and purpose.
Jiang is clear that embracing outbound is much harder than the inbound, passive approach. “It requires more from the recruiters, but it is cost-efficient, and it will be more scalable”. “Imagine if the Sales department only relied on inbound sales”, he notes.
Making outbound recruiting a reality
The creation of this new category of outbound recruitment was what spurred Hiretual to rebrand as hireEZ and change its mission to “outbound recruitment made easy”.
However, Jiang emphasizes that the work is only just beginning. While the recruiting world and hireEZ’s clients were very excited about the new approach, they also had some questions and concerns.
So now hireEZ is trying to figure out how to answer resolve these challenges. A major discussion area is around how to measure outbound recruiting – an issue is that talent acquisition departments are not great at accurately measuring performance in general, according to Jiang.
But “if you cannot measure, you cannot improve” – so this is another opportunity for recruitment teams to learn from Sales.
In addition, hireEZ has been working on – and recently published – a playbook of success stories of companies already forging ahead with the proactive, outbound approach. We need decision-makers, recruiters, and leaders to “understand where we are today in the industry, and also have best practice for the future”.
The future of outbound recruitment
To help hireEZ to turn outbound recruiting from a theory into a reality, the company raised $26 million – the round was led by Conductive Ventures. However, Jiang is clear that going beyond stage one will require additional funding in the future.
The funding will be used to transform hireEZ’s technological offerings. “Outbound recruitment requires engagement with passive job seekers”, “that’s not easy – you need a reliable product and user experience powered by technology”.
hireEz has big plans for future innovations of its tools, such as more integrations, including with ATS tools; currently, it has 50 integrations, but it wants to have triple that by the end of the next financial year.
The company is also working on new features like text and voice messaging, which may be available as soon as May and will be particularly useful for frontline employers. In addition, hireEZ is committed to building connections within recruitment teams, and it wants to create a collaborative tool to help here; stay tuned, says Jiang.
The money will also help hireEZ create a strong community of outbound recruiters – Jiang himself has put ‘Outbound Recruiter’ as his job title on LinkedIn and is encouraging others to do the same – as well as continuing to grow by acquiring new business, customers and users.
“The hope is that hireEZ’s growth will inspire people, especially other vendors, to [get on board]…with outbound recruitment”, according to Jiang.
He is very clear that hireEZ cannot transform the hiring sector on its own. It needs buy-in from the whole community, and particularly its vendor competitors; imitation is the best form of flattery after all. “The more vendors that join, the bigger the space becomes” and recruitment is transformed for good.
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Related activity: Talent acquisition in a hard-to-hire world – Proactive practices to beat the competition. Sign up to the roundtable today.
