However, I didn’t hesitate a New York second when I selected the most important one of them all.

In my mind nothing even come close to a powerful and irresistible message that compels a top person – who’s not looking – to jump out of his or her Aeron and pay attention to what you’re offering.

Sometimes a great employer brand will do the trick. But not everyone has a great employer brand to use as their primary means of animal attraction. In this case it’s the quality and content of your job posting, your voice mail message, or email that must do the trick.

Without a powerful means of differentiating your job from the masses, it doesn’t matter who finds your web site, or how many names you have in your pipeline, or how many resumes you find using AIRS or Shalley’s search techniques. Without a powerful message, you’ll just be left with a bunch of the wrong people you need to sift through. However, with a powerful message at the front of the parade, all of these tools are remarkable for attracting and finding outstanding people. In fact, with a great message you won’t need to work nearly as hard, or use as many tools, to fill every one of your open positions with top talent.

A case study, or three, will help clarify my reasoning for nominating messaging as the primo technique for hiring top talent. I’m now (February 2011) personally leading a number of financial and HR senior management and executive-level retained searches as part of our Performance-based Hiring Shared Search program. While screening a bunch of candidates this past week, three stood out as world-class, high-achieving top performers. All are fully-employed. None are actively looking.

Over the past 30 or so years I’ve personally interviewed well over 10,000 candidates, so when three passive candidates from tier 1 companies make the top 5% list in a 48-hour period, I get jazzed. I spent at least an hour with each, before I give them an A-level ranking, but at the end of the calls I asked each one how we found them. Since I use a team of researchers and sourcers to do the initial screening, I’m not sure how the finalists are initially sourced. Frequently it’s a direct cold call or a referral. In these cases it wasn’t.

A friend of one candidate forwarded an ad we posted on a niche site suggesting this was exactly the job for him. Another candidate who was not even thinking about looking saw our posting on her LinkedIn profile and was compelled to contact us. A third person had used The Ladders in late 2009 to find a position, but kept his job agent alive just in case something turned up. He told me he gets 4-5 messages about jobs per month, but ours screamed out at him touching a career nerve. (Here’s a copy of the same ad on LinkedIn.)

These are not isolated instances. In the past year we’ve conducted about eight executive level searches in a variety of industries, functions, and levels. In all cases 80-90% of the final candidates either saw the ad first, the ad was referred to them, or they received an email from us using our CRM and Boolean search system that they found compelling enough to contact us. We’ve even received messages from people who weren’t interested in the job, but who wanted to thank us for writing such nerve-touching and inspired job postings.

As I go back over my own personal placement history and over the many years working with companies on developing sourcing programs, the thing that stands out as most important from an attraction standpoint is a compelling ad that in some way compels an ideal person to apply. It’s easy to get a person with an economic need for a job to apply, but getting a fully-employed A-level person who’s not looking to proactively contact you is a different process entirely. More important, this inspiration and the content is totally different by class of job, function, and level of the position. Very little of it has anything to do with the traditional job description, so if you use these, don’t. Instead, you need to understand how A-level talent views their careers at whatever stage of life they’re in and then capture this in some way that touches them personally.

We address this critical topic from A-Z in our Recruiter Boot Camp live and online programs. In fact, you can’t get Performance-based Hiring certified until you’ve mastered this technique.