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.

Here’s a good checklist and set of rules to get started on building a separate process around the unique needs of passive candidates. If you want to hire top talent on a consistent basis, I’d suggest this become your default process, rather than the one designed for active candidates.

Lou’s Rules for Finding, Recruiting, and Hiring Passive Candidates

1. Review your hiring process workflow. The process used to find, recruit, assess, and hire passive candidates is fundamentally different than the one used for active candidates. Make sure you’re using the right one.  
2. Engage your hiring manager. If your hiring manager is not totally committed to hiring outstanding people, don’t bother with recruiting passive candidates. You won’t hire any, so don’t waste your energy. Post an ad instead, and hope for the best.
3. Convert jobs into career opportunities. There is not one top passive candidate on the planet who is interested in a lateral transfer, so stop using job descriptions that list skills, duties, responsibilities, and competencies for recruiting or advertising purposes. Instead, define the big challenges of the job and the impact the person can make. We call these performance profiles. You’ll call them difference makers.
4. Post compelling ads and send compelling emails. Passive candidates will always check out the job posting once they decide to find out more. That’s why it’s important that the job posting itself address the career-oriented mentality of the passive candidate. Here’s an example of a position we recently posted on LinkedIn that meets all of the requisite standards. Notice how skills are presented.
5. Develop a workforce plan for all critical positions. It’s difficult enough to find, recruit, and hire passive candidates. It’s worse if you don’t have enough time to do it right. You should know today whom you need to hire over the next 3-6 months for every critical position in your company. 
6. Prepare a sequenced sourcing plan. Before you begin looking, you need a plan outlining all of the likely sourcing channels sequenced to maximize quality of hire in the shortest time to fill and at the lowest cost. Start with a supply vs. demand analysis by geography in combination with a compensation analysis for top performers.
7. Create an ideal candidate persona. Define your target prospect from all perspectives including demographics, 360° connections, career and personal needs, decision criteria, job-hunting status, the most likely companies to source, and the typical – and not-so-typical – academic and background. If you don’t know who you’re looking for, you’ll waste a lot of time in all the wrong places.
8. PERP your ERP and create a VTC. Get your employees to proactively connect (the P in PERP) with all of the best people they’ve ever worked with in the past. Then when you start asking for employee referrals (the ERP) for a specific position you’ll already have the best lined up. Collectively, this network represents a Virtual Talent Community (VTC).
9. Don’t call anyone who’s not qualified and who won’t call you back. Getting pre-qualified referrals is the key to passive candidate recruiting. Networking is the key here. Getting someone credible, like a co-worker, to tell you about a great person with whom they’ve worked in the past is like gold. For one thing, they’ll call you back. For another, you already know they are perfectly qualified. Now all you have to do is recruit them.
10. 10.  Network, network, network following the 80/20 rule. Great recruiters don’t see LinkedIn simply as a list of 140mm+ people. To them it’s a one-degree connection to every top person in the world. That’s why getting 2-3 pre-qualified people on every call is essential. Then spend 80% of your time only calling these pre-qualified referrals, and get 2-3 more people on each of these subsequent calls.
11. Bridge the gap on first contact. Whenever you call a passive prospect the person will always ask about “Day One” criteria (salary, location, title, company) to see if it’s worth discussing. Yet when the person accepts an offer the “Year One and Beyond” criteria (career growth, team, cultural fit, total rewards, work/life balance) trounces the Day One stuff. Bridging this gap in the first five minutes is the key to successful passive candidate recruiting.
12. Maintain applicant control from first contact until the start date. You need to ensure full disclosure, but too often passive prospects opt-out too early for all the wrong reasons. Candidates need to see your job as a true career opportunity, and one that they have to fight to get. You achieve this through applicant control: staying the buyer, not the seller.
13. Formalize the final candidate decision-making process at the beginning. After you bridge the gap on first contact, it’s important that the prospect recognizes that the process you suggest he/she uses to compare and select opportunities should be based on three sets of criteria: Day One, Year One, and Beyond. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
14. Don’t take “No” for an answer. Persistence is the hallmark of the passive candidate recruiter. No matter what you do, the best candidates will always have concerns and objections. Don’t despair. Handling them is an essential part of passive candidate recruiting. The key: uncover the concern, validate it, and then address it. Sometimes you’ll lose for the right reasons. Losing for the wrong reasons is a shame.
15. Close on career opportunity, not compensation. Use the assessment to look for differences between what you need accomplished in comparison to what the person has achieved. The gap represents the career growth opportunity for the person. This is what you’ll use to get the candidate to sell you and ultimately his/her advisory team. As long as the career gap is big enough, compensation will then become secondary.
16. It’s not over until it’s over. Don’t stop recruiting just because the candidate has accepted your offer. The person will get a counter-offer or an offer from someone who just discovered your great passive candidate is looking. Get the hiring manager and the hiring team involved during this time between the acceptance and start date. Idea: review the performance profile and get the person to start planning out the big projects.

Recruiting passive candidates is no easy matter, but essential if you want to consistently hire great people for critical positions. From beginning to end, the process for finding, recruiting, and hiring passive candidates is fundamentally different from the one used for active candidates. If hiring great people is important to your company’s success, the process used to recruit passive candidates should become your company’s default method, not the exception. Imagine the difference this would make.