The criteria top candidates use to accept an offer are not the same as the criteria they use to decide to engage in a discussion about a job. Understanding this difference is a fundamental key to improving your passive candidate recruiting effectiveness. It’s best to break these decision-making criteria into three broad categories to help distinguish the differences.

You can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow, nor the same recruiters, used for active candidates. As shown in the pie chart, 83% of fully-employed members on LinkedIn consider themselves passive when it comes to their job-hunting status. These are the Super Passives, Explorers, and Tiptoers. This breakdown is based on multiple surveys over two years (2010-2011) of LinkedIn’s fully-employed members with approximately 4,500 participants in each survey.

Over the next several months I will be putting together a series of articles, webcasts, recordings, and training sessions focused exclusively on how to find, recruit, assess, and hire passive candidates. Much of this will be converted into eBook form. Collectively, these will represent a complete guide on what it takes to recruit outstanding talent for your organization. Much of the content and examples will assume you’re using LinkedIn’s Recruiter platform; however, it will be useful for anyone who wants to find and recruit passive candidates.

I must have looked at 100+ competency models over the past 15 years. Surprisingly, they’re pretty much all the same. Oh sure, they all have different words, but when you break them down into everyday speak, they all say pretty much the same thing (i.e., some combination and variation of leadership, drive, cultural fit, team skills, confidence, ethics, and technical competency). And that’s one big reason they don’t work. Everyone’s looking for the same things, and on this basis, average is all you should expect.

Of late I’ve been making the contention that the strategies and tactics used to recruit active candidates are fundamentally different than the ones used for passive candidates. Until this foundational difference is resolved, companies will never be able to hire enough top talent to meet their needs, unless they have a big employer brand to hide their process inefficiencies.

You can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow nor the same recruiters used for active candidates. 

If you weren’t at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect last week in Las Vegas (Oct 17-19, 2011) you missed the recruiting event of the year. Since most of the work I do is with SMBs (small to medium size business), I was asked to lead a program on how to create a big brand without the big name. 

I’m going to go out on a very firm limb here and suggest that I’ve just seen the future of passive candidate recruiting and sourcing 2012-2015, and it’s amazing. Before I uncover this tasty morsel for all to see and properly digest, let me set the stage, the lighting, and get the orchestra warmed-up.