Quick Wins in Talent Attraction: The Pre-Live Strategy Most Teams Skip

Most recruitment teams measure success by what happens after a role goes live. Dan Doherty, senior recruitment leader at Cognizant, argues the game is mostly won before the job post is published. Pre-live strategy — challenging grade requirements, rewriting JD language, and building warm pipelines — is where real efficiency is created.

Dan Doherty has spent years running high-volume technical hiring at scale and has a precise view of the decisions that determine whether a campaign succeeds or stalls weeks before launch.

The talent pyramid is upside down — and hiring managers are making it worse

• In the UK tech sector, the ratio of mid-senior to junior and entry-level roles advertised is 8:1, when it should be closer to the reverse
• Hiring managers default to “backfilling at the same grade” as a habit rather than a deliberate decision — it needs to be actively challenged
• Recruiters who go into briefings armed with market data shift the conversation from note-taking to advisory; the hiring manager is the customer, the recruiter is the chef
• Presenting alternative talent profiles as “menu options” — rather than telling managers they’re wrong — is the approach that actually lands

The words in your JD are doing more work than you think

• “Support” vs “own”, “contribute to” vs “accountable for” — these distinctions set candidate expectations and drive self-selection before the application stage
• Empathetic language (“we’ll go on a journey with you, we’re not expecting the finished article on day one”) attracts candidates who are almost right, not only those who are already over-qualified
• Research consistently shows women apply when they can tick 90–95% of criteria; men apply at 60%. JD wording is the single control variable teams can change immediately
• Keep the essentials list tight; be expansive on desirables — this opens the funnel without lowering standards and communicates empathy through structure

Warm talent beats cold talent every time

• Candidates who have had at least one prior brand interaction are 4–6x more likely to be hired
• Building CRM pipelines and talent communities before a role goes live is the difference between a cold search and a warm conversion; the role opens to an audience that is already paying attention
• Evergreen requirements should have pre-built engagement tracks — when the req opens, the response is already in motion
• Brand awareness content that doesn’t ask for anything (day in the life, team moments, CSR activity) is building the queue before the store opens — it’s the Apple or Wimbledon pre-release model applied to recruitment

Split testing is the recruiter’s most underused tool

• Testing different job titles for the same role gives you real market data in hours — not assumptions about what candidates search for
• Google Trends shows you what terms candidates in specific geographies actually use; geography-based search behaviour differences are significant and often counterintuitive
• Programmatic ad sets can be A/B tested the same way Google AdWords campaigns are — cut what isn’t clicking within the first two hours
• “If you can’t explain the role in a tweet, don’t put it out there” — clarity in the job title is above-the-line marketing; everything else is packaging

A lot of what Dan describes plays out before a candidate ever reaches an application form. The careers site is where these attraction signals either compound or collapse — when the pre-live work is done well, the first thing a candidate touches tells the same story that was set up weeks earlier.

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