Niche Recruiting: 5 Strategies To Find the Right Candidate

The realities of sourcing for niche roles are harsh. High demand and low supply lead to an extended time-to-hire and a much higher cost-per-hire than regular roles.

So, if you’ve been asked to recruit for a niche role or two, shake off that sense of doom, because we’ve lined up five niche recruiting strategies that will help you find the right candidates fast.

Niche Recruiting: It’s Not Always About Rare Skills

Niche talent often refers to people with highly specialized skills or expertise in a particular industry, like emerging technologies or specific sectors such as power or healthcare.

It also means sourcing for target candidates who may be underrepresented in a particular industry, such as women in STEM. The skills might be common enough among candidates in general, but identifying them in prospects who are uncommon to a sector is where your DEI strategy comes into play.

Whether you’re focusing on niche skills or niche people, you’ll need targeted strategies. Let’s get started.

5 Niche Recruiting Strategies

1. Define Your Target Candidate

It’s important to know what you want.

You should have a clear definition of your ideal candidate: the specific skills, experiences, qualifications, or type of person required for the role.

Create a detailed job and personal skills description that articulates the unique aspects of the role and the required qualifications. Gather data to inform your description with:

• Input from managers or current employees in similar roles to make sure you have an accurate picture of the job.
• Predictive analytics, to understand more about which types of candidates excel in specific positions.

2. Understand Your Target Candidate

It’s also important to understand what the candidates want, so you can enhance your engagement strategy and employer branding to align with what they’re looking for.

This is especially important for nurturing in-demand passive candidates, or those who aren’t looking for a job right now, but given the right information and opportunity, might jump. It’s important to:

• Understand motivations and preferences. Every candidate is an individual, however, for niche roles candidates often value different benefits compared to those in broader talent pools.

While researching the role, you might discover candidates share a common desire for challenging projects, personal autonomy, or the opportunity to work with their favorite technologies. By understanding what drives people in these niche roles, you can tailor your job offers and recruitment messages to highlight what will most appeal.

• Align your offer with expectations. Niche skills often command higher salaries and specific benefits, so it’s important to understand expectations and craft competitive offers that meet or exceed your competitors’.

Remember to account for non-salary expectations, like flexibility, learning opportunities, or attending industry conferences.

3. Deploy AI for Niche Recruiting

Use AI strategically to streamline your niche recruiting cycle, and you’ll identify, engage, and hire niche talent quickly and effectively. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Proactive Sourcing

Use AI to continuously scan online databases, job boards, social media networks, and specialized platforms like GitHub to identify potential candidates, even if they’re not actively seeking new opportunities.

This proactive approach helps you build a pipeline of passive niche candidates who might be a perfect fit for future roles.

You can also search for interesting details about particular candidates, such as common interests, to help you create more personalized and meaningful communications later on.

Automated Candidate Engagement

Use AI’s engagement capabilities to create and automate a range of personalizable templates for each stage of the niche talent pipeline, saving you the time and tedium of creating communications from scratch every time, as well as keeping your brand strong and consistent.

This doesn’t mean you can’t be human – you’ll use your saved time to deepen the human connection between you and your candidates.

Enhanced Candidate Matching

AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data from resumes, social profiles, and other digital footprints to match candidates with job requirements accurately – and fast. Tweak them to include the factors you’re looking for, like skills, experiences, and even cultural fit.

Widening the Niche Talent Pool

Niche talent often hides in undiscovered talent pools that standard algorithms miss, which is where your diversity and niche recruitment strategies intersect.

Use AI to support skills-first hiring: reduce unconscious bias by focusing on skills and qualifications rather than demographics.

AI-driven tools (like Visage!) can anonymize resumes by removing names and images, or parsing resumes for consistency, which will help you evaluate candidates solely on their abilities and experiences.

Resource Forecasting

AI’s predictive analytics give you insight into your own resource requirement for niche sourcing efforts. It can use your past efforts and results to predict how much effort you’ll need to put in for your next niche talent campaign.

4. Go Deep Into Industry-Specific Communities

You’ll find niche candidates in specialized online forums, industry groups, conferences, and professional associations. Engaging authentically with these communities can give you access to oodles of potential candidates, as well as up-to-the-second information about their interests, aspirations, and concerns.

5. Experiment with Referral Schemes

Use the networks of niche talent you’ve built up from your passive candidate funnel, your relationships with industry groups, or your own co-workers to experiment with a niche talent referral scheme.

You can use these programs to reward your contacts for identifying and recommending skilled individuals who might not be visible otherwise.

Referral schemes can be very powerful talent sourcing mechanisms because they:

• Are based on personal recommendations, so candidates are likely to trust you and what you’re offering.
• Can lead to a better cultural fit.
• Help you to reach more deeply into super-specialized communities.
• Can lead to fast hiring, as the candidate comes with a known track record.

Don’t forget to reward for the recommendation, rather than just for the hire, because:

• You’ll get more recommendations that way.
• Referrals that are unsuitable for one role might still be viable for opportunities in your passive candidate pipeline.
• You’ll show that you value the referrers’ contributions.
• You can’t guarantee a hire, and a referrer who never gets rewarded will soon become discouraged.

How To Make Niche Recruiting Easier

Niche sourcing is the sharp end of recruiting: it’s the hardest thing to get right. But here at Visage, we have the team and the tools to get you up and running quickly.

Check out our AI-powered platform – it’s got everything you need to set up your system for discovering hard-to-source candidates. And don’t forget that our global team of 4,000+ talent sourcing specialists is ready and waiting to unlock a world of niche talent, just for you. Reach out for a demo now.