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.)