New: Ignite Passive Candidates with CodeChallenges

Everyone being remote changes the way you build your pipeline. Good news – the rise of remote significantly widens the pool of candidates you can draw from. And applying digital marketing methodologies to recruitment means that you can run more influential and cost-efficient campaigns at higher scale.

But there’s one challenge that still has to be addressed—shifting passive candidates to active ones.

This month we released our latest version of CodeChallenges with a more flexible look & feel, and stronger campaign tracking functionality. For recruitment marketing, CodeChallenges are a game-changer to help drive more meaningful conversions and collect insight into participants’ skills so you can fast track recruitment.

The Trend Toward Increasingly Passive Candidates

Social media platforms like LinkedIn were supposed to make hiring functions easier. Over 100 million job applications are submitted through LinkedIn every month. And when you’re looking to hire for a specific role, you can easily search the skillsets and experience of the platforms 660+ million users.

However, Peter Cappelli notes a key complication in an article for the Harvard Business Review. He says that there’s been a shift away from internal promotions in favor of external hiring, which means that “hiring efforts are no longer concentrated on entry-level jobs and recent graduates…Now companies must be good at hiring across most levels because the candidates they want are already doing the job somewhere else. These people don’t need training, so they may be ready to contribute right away, but they are much harder to find.”

Despite the accessibility you have on a platform like LinkedIn, today’s technical hiring focuses so much on high-volume recruitment funnels. It seems like the more passive candidates you can engage with, the easier it will be to find people to fill your open positions.

The problem is that high-volume recruiting with passive candidates is inefficient. You can invest so much time screening, interviewing, and assessing a candidate only for them to remain in their current positions. But it’s not realistic to think that we can just revert back to the days when the vast majority of positions were filled through internal promotions and entry-level hires.

Instead, we have to invest more resources in converting passive candidates into active ones. And more often than not, that means making branding activities part of your overall hiring strategy.

Building a Brand Engineers Want to Work for

Turning passive candidates into active ones means creating irresistible opportunities. But even with every hiring team writing stand-out job descriptions and providing the best candidate experiences possible, your employer brand building should start a lot earlier.

Salary and benefits will always be deciding factors for candidates, you can build a better employer brand by promoting other things that technical workers look for in a new position. According to an Indeed study, a few things tech workers care most about include:

• Career advancement opportunities (91%)
• Opportunities for continuous learning (91%)
• Culture (85%)

It’s not up to your hiring strategy to make these things core components of your company culture. However, you have a massive impact on the way candidates perceive your brand and its ability to provide these benefits. By positioning your employer brand as one that can meet and exceed candidate expectations, you’ll be able to convert some of your passive candidates into active ones that alleviate pressure on your hiring processes.

The problem is that most branding activities in the hiring process are related to candidate experience. While this can bring more active job seekers into your funnel, candidate experience is more likely to impact brand perceptions during the actual hiring process. Converting more passive candidates to active job seeking means building a stand-out employer brand that people recognize before they’re ever in your recruitment funnel.

This is the primary focus of  CodeChallenges. By running a CodeChallenge, you’re able to provide an experience that stands out from other tech brands and ignites action amongst job seekers. These online events show candidates that you value their technical abilities and that you’re willing to challenge them to push their limits of their skills. It gives job seekers an idea of the culture your company is building and helps them get excited about applying for your open positions.

We built CodeChallenge to help you:

• Fill Your Pipeline: Get your brand in front of your ideal candidates either online or onsite with an experience that stands out from competitors.
• Draw Online Engagement: Targeted marketing across social will get followers and passive job hunters engaged with your brand and convert them into active candidates.
• Focus on Hiring: Running a CodeChallenge shouldn’t take your focus away from hiring. We handle the tech requirements and make sure the challenge drives competition, leaving you to focus on building your campaign.
• When Possible; Maximize Event Impact: Drive developer foot traffic to your booths at in-person events by facilitating early registration, promoting fun prizes, and running a public leaderboard.

Constantly trying to hire passive candidates is exhausting and inefficient. Taking advantage of branding activities through CodeChallenge can help streamline your recruitment funnel by boosting the number of active candidates applying for your positions.