Maximizing your Passive Candidate Search

New developments at Zoominfo.com are a boon for sourcers, particularly those involved in deep research or passive candidate lead generation. Often misused, the term competitive intelligence encompasses finding as well as analyzing or reporting useful information for business decision support. Focusing on the value-add that research can bring to an organization sourcers now have a big friend with Zoominfo’s new company search by Keyword.  

Traditionally recruiters and sourcers alike hit a silent wall when asking hiring managers or leadership for lists of competitors. Some managers will name a few companies, but they often stick to familiar, obvious competitors, and won’t provide any real insight. What ever the reason for this lack of forthright information, it’s a piece of the puzzle that when present provides invaluable focus to a search. The most successful sourcers will take the initiative to conduct their own research through a myriad of sources like Hoovers, JigSaw, and Lexis-Nexis among countless others. By expanding their target lists of companies sourcers are able to generate more leads with narrower focus, and provide valuable competitive information back to leadership. This process can be laborious, time intensive and even inaccurate.

Being able to confidently access a list of companies matching a particular skill set or industry subset beyond that which SIC or other Industry categorization tools can provide would mark a momentous competitive advantage for busy sourcers and recruiters who frequently don’t have the time to conduct their own research. Access to this information would not only raise the value a recruiter can provide their hiring managers, but also positions them as true business partners, beyond simple service providers or processors. Imagine a meeting where instead of asking a hiring manager for that list of competitors a recruiter comes prepared with a list of potential target companies to review? The hiring manager will immediately recognize value in this, and may even discover competitors they were not previously aware of, or had not considered. Now instead of bringing the burden of questions to a meeting the recruiter brings new useful information, thus starting the relationship from a position of immediate value.

Enter Zoominfo.com’s business information search engine with over 3.4 million companies. Free to search without a subscription, with the simple click of a mouse researchers can quickly generate a comprehensive list of competitor companies matching particular skills, technologies, industry terms and other relevant keywords. From that list they can find potential contacts to seed a search. The key is this provides recruitment organizations swift access to a list of target companies that can become a source of passive candidate leads, while not being limited to the generic industry definitions provided by other industry sector categorizations. As an added benefit this information is near-real-time, being regularly updated and harvested by robots, and can account for small businesses or startups in addition to the commonly available information about large, easily tracked companies.

An example may help illustrate: let’s say you worked for a major print management company and wanted to find other organizations involved in the installation, sale or consulting of managed print services. Go to ZoomInfo.com and from the Company search by Keyword, search for the words “print management” and you will find an extensive list of over 300 public, private and international companies competing in this space.  If a particular competitor stands out, click on that one company and it will bring up their summary, executive bios, and a highly relevant list of their top 20 direct competitors.

As useful as this search engine can be, alone it doesn’t necessarily provide directly actionable research. With access to ZoomInfo’s premium product

PowerSearch researchers can quickly convert this free list of companies into a starter list of prospective leads from those employers. A company search becomes an employee search with the click of a mouse, and this list of leads can be sorted, sub-searched and exported to become the foundation for a bigger list as the research process progresses. Whether a recruiter is names sourcing via the phone or Internet, having a starter list of names inside a company provides leverage for finding other names, and eventually reaching our target. Combined with a much more expanded list of target companies it’s easy to see how this could be a very effective initial strategy when starting a new search.

In the past, one of the drawbacks to archived Internet information was aging. Using the field sort functionality, Zoominfo users were able to list PowerSearch results by the date most recently mentioned online. This is very useful in sorting out the more reasonably fresh leads, but such leads were in short supply thus researchers would tend to take those names to search engines or other data sources to find more recent mentions or whereabouts. While such archival data is helpful from a research perspective, and still yields useful leads, it is clearly not as immediately useful as fresh recent data. In May, Zoominfo’s new search algorithms will make it possible for newly indexed or found data to be added to individual profiles within 24 hours of being found. This new approach places a premium on the newest information available on an individual, and is capable of processing a much larger volume of data than ever before. This translates to a direct improvement on the relevance of information about people on Zoominfo, but most importantly it also adds up to fresher, more immediately actionable leads, and less work required to locate individual targets.

Other extremely useful and little known functions come with a PowerSearch subscription and provide added benefit to a recruiter in need of quick but focused results to begin a search. For example, with PowerSearch it’s possible to enter the web address of a specific conference, association, organization or group, and identify leads within Zoominfo that were found on those websites. This opens a new avenue of research beyond just identifying people from particular companies or with specific job titles. For example, if a recruiter is looking for internal auditors, one of the best avenues to explore for initial leads and particularly for referral sources would be local accounting groups, and standards organizations. A PowerSearch for people from those groups would pull up leads that may very well be suited for that opportunity, but at minimum would be great industry contacts and sources of referrals.

The above is one of several techniques used in Peer Regression Analysis. This methodology suggests that searching for connections or clues pointing to people who worked with or influenced prominent industry figures and thought leaders, like those listed as speakers, panelists, officers or otherwise members of industry associations, would reveal previously untapped sources of leads and prospective candidates with little to no web-presence. Some other ways to identify peers, subordinates, managers or other influencers of prominent industry figures will be covered in the upcoming webinar on April 25th.