Exceptional prospects often demand an extended trust relationship with a recruiter. So, top recruiters maintain an ongoing talent pipeline for their currently non-job-seeking top prospects. That talent pipeline gives busy recruiters more time to build engagement and trust relationships until individual pipeline members are ready to consider your open jobs.

Fortunately, there are three quick, no-cost actions that can help a recruiter remain fully engaged with their pipeline members. Each method is purposely subtle, ensuring the recruiter doesn’t come across as pushy or solely focused on making a placement. The first two recommended subtle engagement actions include sending birthday wishes and acknowledging work anniversaries. While the third is personalizing your messaging so they feel like they are receiving special personalized information and treatment.

1) A “Best Wishes Birthday Note” Will Build Their Engagement

Of course, everyone has a birthday. However, even those who don’t celebrate their birthdays with parties usually still notice it when people who they didn’t expect to send them a best wishes note, actually do. Birthday notes are an effective prospect engagement tool that is unlikely to fail. Provided that your birthday note doesn’t include even a hint of a recruiting pitch.

The first recruiting benefit from these notes is that they remind your recruiting prospect that their recruiter is thinking about them, even though there are no current job opportunities. Another recruiter benefit is that these birthday notes give you an opportunity to contact their prospects outside of the normal busy recruiting season. And if you title your birthday message correctly, so that spam filters don’t intercept it, there is a high probability that your message will be read, remembered, and even responded to.

Incidentally, the month with the most US birthdays is August.

Another recruiter benefit is that automated birthday messages are easy to send. Because there are a variety of free automated birthday message apps (including Gmail), and it’s also relatively easy to identify someone’s birthday.

A member’s birth date is often revealed in the “about me” section of their social media sites. You can also identify birthdays by searching the person’s social media stream for their birthday celebration posts. You should also be aware that there are numerous free and paid people-finding sites that use public records to identify anyone’s birthday. Using an AI-powered search app for their birthdate is always a viable option.

Incidentally, if the recipient does respond to your message, you must avoid including anything directly related to recruiting in your response. And instead, subtly suggest that maybe you two should connect again soon.

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