Most recruiting teams focus on active and casual jobseekers — just 25% of the reachable talent market. The real opportunity? The Hidden 75% of passive talent who aren’t applying but can be influenced. This blog introduces the Rally ReachMap™ and shows you how to build a recruiting strategy that attracts and engages this overlooked majority.

What if I told you that most recruiting teams are spending the majority of their time and budget trying to reach just a fraction of the talent market — the people actively applying for jobs?

The real opportunity to hit your hiring goals this year — and gain a lasting recruiting advantage — isn’t about chasing more active jobseekers. It’s about building a strategy to engage the Hidden 75%: the passive talent majority who aren’t job hunting yet, but who can be persuaded if you reach them the right way.

Let’s talk about the gap that’s holding back most talent acquisition strategies today, why it’s imperative that we shift our mindset from depending on job advertising to embracing a comprehensive Recruitment Marketing strategy, and what you can do about it right now to change your hiring results in 2025 and beyond.

Most Recruiting Strategies Are Built for Active Talent—But Most Talent Aren’t Active

Here’s the hard truth: Just 3.9% of workers are actively looking for a job right now, according to the latest U.S. labor force data.

Even if you include people who are working but quietly exploring other options, you’re still only reaching 25% of the total reachable talent market.

Yet job advertising — on job boards, aggregators, paid search and programmatic — is still where most of the recruitment budget and resources go. That’s like fishing in one corner of the lake — just because a few fish are biting there. Meanwhile, the rest of the lake is teeming with opportunity, if you bring the right bait. (P.S. That corner’s getting crowded — all your talent competitors are casting there too.)

The Hidden 75%: A New Way to Reframe Your Recruiting Strategy

To help our community see the full picture, we created the Rally ReachMap™ — a data-driven view of the talent engagement spectrum that helps align your recruiting strategy with candidate intent. It’s based on an analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, public information from job boards and career platforms, and proprietary candidate engagement insights from our Rally® Inside™ Recruitment Marketing Platform.

This spectrum breaks down the labor market into 5 distinct segments, based on how receptive people are to recruiting offers and how likely they are to engage with your employer brand and jobs:

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