I’ve discovered a few critical recruiting principles over the past 30 years placing hundreds of top performers in staff, management, and executive positions. Here’s a quick summary of Lou’s Recruiting Rules:

The best active and passive candidates always have multiple options. As a result they need more convincing that the job you're offering is better than the other opportunities they're considering. For passive candidates, they need to be convinced that your job is even worth evaluating. Convincing these top candidates to proceed in the hiring process and then to accept a fair offer is what recruiters need to do to be successful. Recruiting is not about finding and hiring candidates who need another job. Anybody can do this. These candidates will do whatever you suggest.

As part of our hybrid executive search practice (we integrate our Performance-based Hiring training into a real search project), I’ve noticed that high-demand candidates are starting to get multiple opportunities. This could be a sign of an upcoming improvement in the hiring market. If so, it means that advanced recruiting skills will soon become more important in hiring the best talent. One of the most important of these is not to take a “no” or its equivalent “not interested” at face value when a candidate invokes it. To get your message heard, you’ll need to break through this mental blockade. One way to do this is to use the “AGM – strategy vs. tactics” technique.