Recruiting passive candidates require job insight, a partnership between the hiring manager and the recruiter, and an ability to present your job opening as a potential career move, not a lateral transfer. 

This is a short message, but critical, about the importance of messaging. Someone recently asked me to rank-order the value and importance of different recruiting tools and techniques. The list has everything imaginable listed, including advanced Boolean searching, overcoming objections, pipelining, negotiating offers, search engine marketing, Web 2.0, social networking, employee referrals, networking tools, partnering with hiring managers, and the like. You name it, and it was on the list.

Engaging with strong passive candidates who are not looking for a new position is not about making cold calls, describing a position, and hoping someone says yes. It’s about engaging in a career discussion and getting the candidate to agree to proceed if the opportunity represents a strong career move. You can start this conversation by asking the person if he or she would be open to explore a situation if it were clearly superior to the person’s current position. Most people will say yes to this question, but it’s what you do next that will determine your success in recruiting, and ultimately hiring, passive candidates. With this objective in mind, here are some ideas to consider:

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.