Why Build an Internal Resume Database?

Before giving this a read, please be sure to check out the previous article, What is an Internal Resume Database?, if you haven’t already.

In this article, we try to get an intuitive understanding of the benefits of your own internal sourcing channel.

Just to recap, your internal resume database is a set of highly targeted candidates who are already familiar with you (similar to “warm leads” in marketing).

Given that you are a recruitment & talent acquisition professional, chances are you are working on similar positions throughout the year. So, the question is, would you like to start the sourcing exercise from scratch every time you get a new requirement? Or would you like to tap into your internal resume database of “warm candidate leads” first? Technically speaking, are the sourcing channel effectiveness, sourcing channel cost, and time to hire metrics of your internal resume database better than those of external channels?

Let us take a leaf out of the field of sales & marketing to explain the value of your internal resume database or “warm leads”. Sales & Marketing and Recruitment & Talent Acquisition are two fields that have more in common than one might think.

When doing sales & marketing, once leads are qualified (highly targeted), essentially they are put into two buckets, cold and warm leads. Cold leads are people who are not familiar with your product or service, and warm leads are people who are familiar with your product or service.

What happens when a lead does not convert to a customer immediately? Do marketers and salespeople move on and go for acquiring new leads every time? Or do they retarget them and build a relationship to convert them to customers?

As you can see, marketers and salespeople are faced with a similar scenario. Enter Retargeting. It is the process of retargeting warm leads. It is an essential part of the marketing and sales funnel and rightfully so. Here are a few key benefits:

– Much higher conversion rate: Warm leads are much more likely to convert to a customer due to their high relevance to your product/service, and the familiarity and relationship built with you during the retargeting process.

– More cost-effective: You are simply reusing your leads and making the most of every lead by patiently retargeting them till they convert to a customer.

– Time-saving: No need to empty the lead funnel and start from scratch every time. Just keep working on the leads you already have.

– Improved brand awareness, recall, and referrals: If you appear in front of your leads more often, it leads to higher familiarity, which means they talk about your brand outside, which means more referrals.

– Brand loyalty: You can sell more to those leads in the future because of the relationship built in the retargeting process.

When you think about it, recruitment & talent acquisition is not very different. Your internal resume database (“warm candidate leads”) can be “retargeted” for future openings. If you draw parallels with Retargeting, you can immediately see a few major benefits:

– Firstly, it saves you a lot of money the next time you work on a similar position because the candidates you are searching for might already be with you (by virtue of having built a high-quality resume pool). Therefore, this channel could just be your most cost-effective one.

– Furthermore, your internal candidate database is full of candidates who are highly relevant and whom you have built a personal relationship with, thereby giving you a significant competitive advantage (as opposed to external databases that are shared, and available to everyone). As a consequence, the hiring conversion rate/sourcing channel effectiveness is much higher when compared to external sources.

– It can really bring down the time to hire. Just one search of your internal database could give you the candidate you are looking for. You save all the time that you would spend starting from scratch.

– Brand awareness and referrals will be much higher if you maintain your relationship with candidates from your internal database. Since you are in front of their eyes more often, it is only natural for them to talk about you outside and refer more candidates to you as well.

– Brand loyalty will also be much higher: Candidates, nowadays, change jobs quite often. So, when they think “job change”, they will naturally think “you”.

All in all, an internal resume database is definitely a channel worth exploring. So, go ahead. Start building your internal resume database and stand out from the crowd.

Please be sure to check out the next article in this series, How to build/maintain an Internal Resume Database?

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