This Is the Most Underutilized Asset in Recruiting A recruiting leader at Google discusses what he thinks is the most underutilized asset in recruiting--and why you should be using it.

I've been working with the Google team that created the Hire recruiting app. Recently they announced a new intuitive search capability, candidate discovery, that gives recruiters a head start by identifying past candidates who are a good fit for a new position. You may wonder, why is this so powerful? First, let's talk about the most underutilized asset in recruiting.

"We need more pipeline! We need better pipeline!" - is the constant refrain we recruiters hear from hiring managers. And our solution seems to be a never ending battle to find the next flashy tool or fancy boolean string to build a better pipeline of candidates. Obviously, pipeline is and will always be a challenge for companies looking to hire...especially if you are trying to hire at scale.

But…...it doesn't need to be this hard. Frankly, it's probably a lot easier than most of us realize. Every company, regardless of your size is sitting on a treasure chest of previous applicants. It doesn't matter if you post one job or a thousand jobs a year...people apply and ultimately are not hired. "Who cares? We didn't hire them Jeff, they weren't a fit!"

Well, I'm telling you it's critical to your business and hiring goals to care. Here's why:

Ease of Hire - I talk about making easy hires all the time with my team. People say "every hire is hard" but those of us in the weeds know, it's not true. Every hire has a different degree of difficulty. A great example of this, would be someone who applied for a role in college but now has a few years of relevant experience or the runner-up for a role you filled in the past. If you are able to leverage your database to make a few quick hires, that will free you up to spend more time working on those niche, complicated and priority hires that require deep sourcing expertise.

Candidate Experience - Pardon the cliche, but candidate experience matters. It matters today more than ever. Why, you ask? A candidate that has a bad experience with your company is likely to head directly to Glasssdoor, Twitter or any other social platform and let the world know how terrible you are. Not cool. This might not seem obvious, but calling someone who applied two years ago and saying something like this "Hey Jeff, we have a job that is a great fit for you. I see you applied in the past and I just wanted to check to see if you'd still be interested" can totally change their experience with your company. As recruiting becomes more AI driven, this kind of personal touch stands out.

Cost of Hire - Everyone cares about "Cost of Hire." It's one of the most important recruiting metrics you can measure. The less you spend, to hire the best people the better. Assuming your interview process maintains your quality bar (future blog idea!), then extracting amazing talent from your database pretty much free pipeline. No need to pay for posting fees or fancy tools….run a search into your previous applications and start hiring.

Increased Conversion Rates - This is my favorite reason to mine your database. Typically, you hear a lot about generating more "active" or "passive" talent but I'd like you to think about a whole different type of candidate. Introducing the "passive/active candidate." They are "passive" because when you call them, they are not actively on the market. However, they are also "active" because at some point the candidate expressed interest in your organization. This matters because we all know that active candidates are more likely to accept and offer than the passive talent that might be just poking around new opportunities. By creating a pipeline of "passive/active" candidates you get the best of both worlds….talent that is not actively engaging with multiple companies but you know is serious about joining you. Perfect pipeline if you ask me.

Next time you open up a search, look into your database first as you might find exactly who you were looking for all along. And if you need a better way to track and search back across these candidates, Hire by Google offers candidate discovery functionality that can help. Effectively leveraging the candidates already in your database is critical to your long term hiring plan.

If you want to find out how to tap into your already valuable candidate database, I suggest you head over to hire.google.com.

Jeff Moore is a Staffing Manager at Google and has over 20 years of recruiting experience. He is currently responsible for building the Consumer Hardware team within Google. Jeff grew up in New England and currently lives in Silicon Valley with his family and two dogs.