Passive candidate recruiting:
A place to start building your competitive advantage

Passive candidate recruiting: What’s all the fuss about?
Passive candidate recruiting is generating plenty of buzz among industry observers, vendors and employers. For recruiters in the trenches, the debate raises important questions like, “What's all the fuss about and why is this important to me?” and “How does recruiting passive candidates help build competitive advantage?”

Simple answers to these questions are hard to come by. The competing interests of those in the recruiting industry along with the differences in employers' shape, size and markets makes a one-size-fits-all solution impossible to imagine.

The real challenge for HR management and leadership is twofold:

• Define the differences between active and passive candidates, understanding how to develop winning strategies for recruiting the best candidates, whoever they are; and

• Develop recruiting strategies that address the organization's hiring needs, now and into the future

This process starts with articulating who the ideal candidates are.

With a systematic approach to candidate profiling we can identify the hard and soft skills, experiences and attitudes that a “qualified” candidate should possess. Once we know who we are looking for we can begin to identify where we might find them. It follows that for jobs where the demand for talent outstrips the supply we are most likely to find the largest number of possible hires among the presently employed.

Who's who? A question of time and place
Truly passive candidates are barely influenced by employers' recruiting activities while active candidates will commit considerable time and effort to finding a job. Active job seekers are motivated by any number of circumstances and may or may not be currently working, but the fact is this: Passive and active candidates are not different types of people but "qualified" individuals who simply have different levels of engagement in their employment.

Knowing that passive and active candidates are the same person described in the candidate profile, successful recruiters can begin to bridge the gap of interest and availability that exists between candidates and the recruiters’ job reqs. For passive candidates that divide can appear to be a chasm while for the most active crossing over requires little more than a hop, skip and a jump.

Of course, candidates' levels of interest and availability shift. Changes in management, workloads or personal circumstances can accelerate the transition from passive to active candidate. In extreme cases, layoffs, natural disasters, lost contracts and other forms of sudden unemployment can lead this to happen overnight.

With these things in mind, HR management and leadership must work closely with their recruiters to develop and deliver the right message with the right frequency to keep their opportunities top-of-mind. That way, when the time is right, the recruiter can provide an obvious bridge between the old job and a better one.

Passive candidate recruiting: Why now?
Until 10 years ago, recruiting was pretty simple: we posted ads and candidates responded. When we needed direct recruiting, we used search firms. But recent changes in the number of available candidates to do the most important work has lead to a so-called “war for talent.” This in turn has created an environment where competition among employers for the best candidates has intensified, compounded by the fact that talent is becoming harder to entice as they realize their own value.

Yet the distribution of recruiting resources has hardly changed from then until now. Active candidates are highly visible to a lot of recruiters, so really great candidates aren’t on the market long. This invariably reduces the return on traditional recruitment advertising, making passive candidate recruiting an increasingly attractive option.

Even today, with the war for talent heating up, companies typically continue to view passive candidates as being exclusively in the domain of executive search. Many employers view passive candidate sourcing as beyond their own recruiting competency or comfort zone, and are willing to pay a premium for it, often in addition to what they spend on print ads and postings.

However, more progressive organizations have adopted many of the tools and techniques historically used by executive search firms. Now more widely available, these tools include services for identifying who potential candidates are and where they are currently working. These tools even document passive candidates' career history, professional associations and reputation.  This type of profile data helps even novice recruiters connect on personal and professional levels which helps them quickly establish a working relationship with the candidate.

The best of both worlds: A blended approach
Having identified who the best candidates are and where to find and engage them, the next step in building a competitive advantage is in managing our internal resources for managing talent.

A pool of both passive and active candidates to draw from is key to reducing the time-to-fill and the cost per hire. Yet moving “passive” candidates along is different from engaging and developing “active” candidates. Just as passive candidates need to be “sold” and active ones need to be “vetted,” so too must organizations adapt their internal processes to meet the expectations of each group.

As a result many employers have decided that passive candidate sourcing and active candidate development require separate teams and resources. Others continue to support a full-cycle approach, arguing the pay-off is in consistency, workflow and recruiter accountability. Either way, those organizations that consistently pursue both active and passive candidates will ultimately have access to a wider pool of candidates to choose from.

By recruiting ahead of the organization's needs in this way the disruption caused by vacancies can be minimized, sometimes avoided altogether. This in turn lessens the load that recruiters have to carry and allows them more time to develop still more passive candidates for future needs, a “virtuous cycle” of sorts!

At each step passive candidate recruiting requires a coordinated and systematic approach, thoughtful execution and sufficient time for internal processes to payoff. For sure, as the competition for talent continues to intensify and the best candidates are scooped up with ever-increasing speed, understanding the basics of passive candidate recruiting becomes less a topic for debate and more an imperative for every organization to understand.

With over 20 years in business, and more than a decade in leadership roles for recruitment process outsourcing, talent management consulting and recruiter training firms, Amitai Givertz has developed an unique perspective seen through the prism of employers, recruiters, candidates and vendors. In his current role as an innovator, advisor and coach, Ami continues to focus on how to improve the overall experience and outcomes for everyone involved in the process.

Described as “one of the most provocative and infectious of the new voices that have emerged in the industry,” and as “fast becoming a central theorist and practitioner in 21st Century online recruiting” Ami is widely recognized for his active participation in the ongoing debate on how social media, networking and “2.0 values” can help advance the recruiting industry’s progress in a fast-evolving world.

Ami writes daily for a number of online publications that examine recruiting, business and innovation. He is a contributing editor on Recruiting.com and sits on the Advisory Board for Kennedy Information's Recruiting Trends.