Let’s make the assumption that the best passive candidates are only interested in discussing possible career moves. This is a pretty safe assumption, and one that will never lead you astray when recruiting passive candidates. The key to recruiting passive candidates is to get them to see your opportunity as a career move in the first few minutes of your initial conversation. Pulling this off involves four critical steps:

In a recent article on Recruiting Passive Candidates I made the point that you must not take “No” for an answer on first contact. Passive candidates say this often when you call and ask them if they’d be interested in some job, somewhere, for some company. If you don’t push back, all you’ll be doing is spinning the roulette wheel hoping someone finds your winning number right up their alley. At our Recruiter Boot Camp Online training we describe the science of recruiting passive candidates. In this article I’ll provide a sense of this by describing what you need to do when someone reacts to your offer with one of these two objections:

Without question, having a large LinkedIn network is a competitive advantage for any recruiter working on hard-to-fill positions and hard-to-find candidates. This advantage is lessened dramatically with LinkedIn Recruiter, since it includes complete visibility to the 70mm+ people in their network. Since this full-visibility product is off-limits to TPRs it levels the playing field somewhat for corporate recruiters. But this is not as significant a disadvantage as it would seem to those of us who have to find top candidates the old-fashioned way – networking. Getting pre-qualified referrals from people who will call you back is the real secret of recruiting passive candidates. With this in mind, I’d like to offer a few of my favorite passive candidate recruiting secrets.

I’ve just written a recent companion piece on ERE (July 30, 2010) on my top ten favorite networking techniques for recruiting passive candidates. There were actually more than 20, but here are the next five. Caution: there are two prerequisites when using any of these techniques. First, you must get the candidate to agree to enter into an exploratory career discussion as a condition for beginning the conversation. Second, with this permission granted, give no more than a 20-second overview of the position, and then immediately ask the prospect to provide some preliminary background information. (We cover exactly how to do this in our Recruiter Boot Camp training.)

At Chicago’s SMA Symposium last month, I presented an updated version of my Corporate Recruiter scorecard. Click here for a link to the handout and the ranking form.

Earlier this year I presented a financial model that demonstrated that on average, hiring a C+ person instead of a B+ person costs a company somewhere between 50 and 100% of the person’s annual compensation.

Between 1978 and 2002, I personally made 457 placements. These represented a combination of retained and contingency searches ranging from professional staff to general management. In addition, I was actively involved in another 283 search assignments where I either got the retained assignment, or had my candidates as finalists. In total, about 60 percent of these were true passive candidates. The others were hot tiptoers who didn’t need the job we were handling, but were looking for the best career move among competing alternatives.

Most recruiters think that recruiting means being able to sell or talk your candidate into the merits of your job.  To me, this is a 10% solution at best.  While it will work some of the time, it misses the forest for the trees.  

At the ERE Expo in San Diego, March 15-17, 2010, I’ll be describing what it takes to be a true corporate headhunter. This is a recruiter who can go head to head with his or her external rivals without compromising quality of hire or time to fill. To pull it off though, you’ll have to break some company rules and break from tradition. In the process you will probably aggravate your comp, compliance, legal, and I/O departments, at least at first. Hopefully, your recruiting manager will intercede and act as a buffer as you plow ahead making a positive contribution.