ERE.net

It’s a brand new year, great things are on the horizon … and for me, I have had it up to my eyeballs with a particular topic. I am so fed up with this topic that I want to climb to the highest peak and scream, bang my head against a wall, and even toss my desk around the room over and over. This topic that’s making me and others so irritated is Passive Candidates.

Yes, that’s right. The topic or even the mention of passive candidates now a day makes me want to throw up. In conducting my own personal year in review and through scouring HR topics, articles, blogs, etc., it seems as if 2011 was the year of the “Passive Candidate.” My response … so the heck what.

I guess I am at a loss as to why there is so much over-emphasis on “passive candidates.” Whatever happened to simply hiring the most-qualified, best-fit individual who can add their strengths in order to advance the organization? Now we have resorted to “Commandments of Recruiting Passive Candidates,” “Rules to Recruit Passive Candidates”, “Your Guide to Passive Candidates” — you get my point.

So here are some questions for you to ask yourself and answer: keep reading…

This article is part of my continuing series on passive candidate recruiting. The key principle underlying all of these articles is that you can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow, nor the same recruiters, used for active candidates.

According to a recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn, 83% of fully-employed members on LinkedIn consider themselves passive when it comes to their job-hunting status. While this is a huge and important pool, most companies over-emphasize the 17% of candidates who are active. Then to make matters worse, when they do target passive candidates, they clumsily use their active candidate processes.

To assist talent leaders in understanding the differences between active and passive candidate recruiting, I’ve developed a recruiter competency model addressing the similarities, differences, and overlaps. Contact me directly if you’d like to learn more about this. It’s highlighted in the graphic showing the 12 most important competencies alongside a very rigorous 1-5 ranking system. For example, a 4-5 ranking requires outstanding performance, some type of significant recognition, and continuing accolades from the recruiter’s hiring manager clients.

A recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn clearly indicated the 83% of their fully employed members classified themselves as passive candidates. It seems to me that if you’re not an expert at recruiting this 83%, you’re missing the 800-pound gorilla.

To help here, I’m in the process of consolidating and summarizing all of the articles, webcasts, and recordings I’ve prepared in the past few years on passive candidate recruiting into some type of eBook format. Some of the stuff actually works, so this could be a pretty good handbook on how to use Performance-based Hiring to find, recruit, assess, and hire passive candidates. To get started I figured I’d put the Table of Contents together with a short description. This is shown below. keep reading…

This week, I had the pleasure of receiving some feedback from two candidates who recently completed the hiring process, each with a different end result with our organization. As talent acquisition professionals, the majority of us strive to ensure that proper recruiting processes and procedures are in place, and at the same time we wonder if the candidate is truly having the experience we initially envisioned and created.

Granted, my organization is still far off from where we want and need to be from a talent acquisition standpoint; however, we are taking the proper steps to get there as an enterprise. One particular topic that has always been the focus of my recruiting career is the candidate experience. Some will argue that it includes an employment brand, a cutting-edge career site, high-performing HR technology, etc. I have always believed and will continue to believe that while those items are important, nothing can replace the importance of proper human interaction. This will truly set your company’s candidate experience apart from other companies out there in the marketplace.

Two case in points occurred this week: two individuals, two different positions. The first individual, who did not receive an offer, sent us an email thanking us for how we handled and treated him through the search process. Here is a snippet of the note that we received: keep reading…

This will be my shortest, and my last article for ERE. At least for 2011. Regardless of the timing and its length, it may very well be my most important article this year, at least if you want to hire top people who are not overtly looking for another job. It consists of a few pithy ideas you need to embrace if you want to be successful recruiting passive candidates.

Adler’s Holiday Missives 2011 on How to Recruit Passive Candidates

Bridge the Gap on First Contact. Recognize that for passive candidates “Criteria to Engage” is different that the “Criteria to Accept” an offer. On first contact passive candidates decide to engage based on “Day 1” criteria. This includes the job title, the company, the location, and the compensation. However, when deciding to accept an offer, top passive candidates use “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria. This includes the career opportunity, the importance of the work, the hiring manager and team, the compensation and total rewards package, work/life balance, and the company mission and culture. Being able to bridge this gap on first contact is the difference between hiring great people and wasting your time. keep reading…

John Sullivan asked: Are QR codes the next big thing in recruitment technology?

For adidas, an award winner last year, they’re already a big thing.

Craig Larson heads up U.S. recruiting. He started about a year ago, about the same time, he says, that adidas “identified a problem that needed a solution.”

The problem begins with the fact that adidas sends lots of people to trade shows in places like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York. These people aren’t recruiters, usually — and in fact recruiters sometimes are not welcome at the conventions. They are designers, marketers, buyers, and others there to “push product and get orders,” Larson says. “There’s a lot of deals down there and a lot of passive candidates.” Depending on the event, adidas can send a recruiter or two, but “a lot of times they don’t like us tagging along.”

On top of that, trade-show goers are often with their bosses, and not able to talk jobs. keep reading…

Of late I’ve been making the contention that the strategies and tactics used to recruit active candidates is fundamentally different than the ones used for passive candidates. Until this foundational difference is resolved, companies will never be able to hire enough top talent to meet their needs, unless they have a big employer brand to hide their process inefficiencies.

Employer brands, however, have limited shelf lives in maturing markets. As an example, just compare Google today and its continuing series of product blunders to the Microsoft of 10-15 years ago. When a company’s business strategy changes due to changing market conditions, its talent acquisition strategies must immediately follow suit.

Quickly, here’s what I believe are at the root cause of most companies’ hiring challenges: keep reading…

by John Sullivan and Laureen Edmiston

Several weeks ago ere.net published an article that asked the question “what are the dumbest things that recruiters do.” After surveying recruiters on ere.net, Twitter, and at the recent SMA symposium in Seattle, it is clear that most feel the dumbest thing recruiters do is…

Not managing the candidate experience — the candidate experience is the perception of the sum of interactions with an organization throughout the hiring process. It includes every communication, the design of the process, the fairness of process elements, the quality of information exchanged, and the honesty with which questions and concerns are addressed. Providing a poor candidate experience can have many negative consequences, including an increased candidate dropout rate, negative word-of-mouth, and decreased loyalty to the overall brand.

The rest of the “Top 10” are… keep reading…

You can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow nor the same recruiters used for active candidates.

We conducted an in-depth survey with LinkedIn last year that indicated that 82% of their fully-employed members were unlikely to even consider switching jobs unless directly contacted by a recruiter or through an employee they’ve worked with closely in the past. This increased slightly to 83% in this year’s survey. This is shown on the graph, with the dark blue line representing the satisfaction level of those surveyed (4,550 fully-employed LinkedIn members) comparing their job seeking status and job requirements over time.

From a strategy standpoint, the idea is to find candidates either the moment they actively enter the job market, or before. But to do this, you need a different process for sourcing and recruiting the 83% who are not actively looking than used for those who are. This is what is meant by an “Early-bird Sourcing Strategy.”

The surveys also highlighted the fact that most companies spend most of their recruiting resources targeting the 17% who are actively looking. Making matters more challenging, while most passive candidates are open to a discussion with a recruiter, they would only consider a significant career move to switch jobs.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be hosting a few webcasts describing how to develop this type of early-bird sourcing program. Part of this will describe some of the workflow process changes required to support the strategy, and the specific competencies a recruiter needs to possess in order to implement it. These changes are not insignificant. keep reading…

If you weren’t at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect last week in Las Vegas (Oct 17-19, 2011) you missed the recruiting event of the year. Since most of the work I do is with SMBs (small to medium size business), I was asked to lead a program on how to create a big brand without the big name. As part of this I introduced a new concept for how companies should benchmark their social media presence and effectiveness: the Social Media Pyramid. I know many of you will be vying for awards at the Spring 2012 ERE Expo, and social media will play a role in quite a few of the awards, so I thought I’d give you my guidelines for using the Social Media Pyramid as guide.

Most companies are using a hodgepodge of social media ideas, trying a little of this and a little of that, in the hope something works. Rather than proceed in such a haphazard manner, I’ve decided to give some structure to the process by creating five levels of social media effectiveness based on currently available technology. keep reading…

Social media gets a lot of press. There seem to be millions of articles offering advice on how to succeed with social media, in business, in fundraising, starting revolutions, and of course, recruiting. A lot of that advice is as useful as a bicycle for a fish — since it’s often anecdotal or the wisdom of some self-styled guru writing about purple sheep or comparing anyone that doesn’t follow their advice to dinosaurs. So it’s great to read something that’s based on data and research, like a recent report from Gallup that has implications for recruiting.

The Medium vs the Message

There’s more going on offline than online. keep reading…

Nasa photo of "crystal ball" nebula

I’m going to go out on a very firm limb here and suggest that I’ve just seen the future of passive candidate recruiting and sourcing 2012-2015, and it’s amazing. Before I uncover this tasty morsel for all to see and properly digest, let me set the stage, the lighting, and get the orchestra warmed-up.  keep reading…

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog I came across this quote attributed to Steve Jobs (this has been paraphrased for the ERE audience):

Screw the channel.

Manage the present for optimum performance.

Reinvent the future.

The equivalent for recruiting goes something like this:

Screw sourcing.

Maximize quality of hire.

Become a great recruiter.

The point: hiring great talent is not about great sourcing; it’s about great recruiting. And if you continue to chase the next sourcing silver bullet you’ll wind upexactly where you are today in 5-10 years from now. In fact, those of you who have followed the “chase-the-sourcing-silver-bullet” strategy have not improved quality of hire in the past 5-10 years. The only companies who have shattered this fundamental truth in the war for talent have been those who have a great employer brand. For everyone else, improving quality of hire requires great recruiters.

In a nutshell, here’s my secret formula for hiring great talent:

Great Hires = Good Sourcing plus Great Recruiting

If you follow this formula you’ll be seeing and hiring far better people. Here are some ideas on how to reinvent the future of recruiting: keep reading…

Let’s get real here. Anyone who thinks LinkedIn is in the doghouse when it comes to recruiting the best talent isn’t a real recruiter, or they don’t know the difference between active and passive candidates, or they think sourcing is recruiting. So I’m going to use this article (and this webcast) to set the record straight.

First, let me first define a real recruiter:

1. They have excellent relations with the hiring manager and the hiring team. As part of this, 100% of their candidates they present are interviewed by the hiring manager, and none are bad.
2. They understand what it takes to maximize quality of hire, and achieve it on every assignment.
3. They thoroughly understand real job requirements and why the job is important to the company. As part of this they can convince their hiring managers that using traditional job descriptions minimizes the opportunity to hire top performers.
4. They are subject matter experts when it comes to knowing the company, the industry, the compensation ranges for the positions they handle, and the competition.
5. They prepare sourcing plans and programs based on how the best talent looks for work, especially passive candidates.
6. They are comfortable picking up the phone and talking to real people and getting outstanding referrals.
7. The best candidates consider these recruiters great career advisors and proactively refer other top people to them.
8. They can accurately assess competency and job fit on multiple measures including how the hiring manager and the person will work together.
9. They maximize their first contact to final close yield (candidate opt-out rate) by recruiting at every step in the process.
10. They can close the deal by emphasizing the career growth opportunity, not the compensation.

Being a real recruiter is less important if cost per hire is more important than quality of hire, and your management team is comfortable with hiring average people. However, if you want to implement a raising-the-talent-bar strategy, or facing a situation where the supply of talent is less than the demand, you need a real recruiter to pull it off, and in most cases they’ll need to target passive candidates. (Here’s a “real recruiter” competency model we created, if you’d like to rank yourself or your teammates. You need to score at least 35 out of 50 points to be considered a “real recruiter.”)

From a “let’s get real recruiting” standpoint, LinkedIn has a major edge over its current rivals. This is important since 82% of the professional fully employed categorize themselves as passive candidates. With real recruiting in mind, here are my top reasons why LinkedIn has a significant edge over Facebook, Google+, and those newbies who think they offer a better solution. keep reading…

According to Moody’s Analytics, nearly 148,000 tech jobs will be created in the U.S. by the end of 2011. Surprisingly, the biggest hiring challenge many technology companies face is that many of the industry’s most talented professionals aren’t actively looking for new jobs. Gone are the days of shuffling through hundreds of resumes of potentially qualified candidates. Today’s savvy companies are proactively pursuing the industry’s top talent on sites like LinkedIn, BranchOut, and ZoomInfo. Now more than ever, hiring managers need to be highly networked and engaged in their area of specialty in order to get to know the best of the best.

Developing strong relationships with passive candidates is particularly challenging because you must engage them in a dialogue they aren’t necessarily interested in having. Creativity is king when it comes to designing your strategy for attracting passive talent.

Here are some techniques I have used to differentiate CDW’s recruitment efforts, and engage the most talented passive candidates: keep reading…

I’m concerned that most corporate recruiters don’t understand what it really takes to recruit passive candidates. In three minutes, I think you’ll agree. If you’re looking for candidates where the demand for talent outstrips supply, the ability to recruit top passive candidates will now be more difficult than ever. Those people with good jobs will hang on even tighter, and recruiters will need to use every technique in the book to pry them loose.

In the first article in this series I defined six skills that a recruiter must possess in order to effectively recruit passive candidates. Collectively, they’re called the 6Cs. While all are important, some are more critical than others. Here are the results of a recent poll we took of corporate and third-party recruiters asking them to define the most important of the six skills. Here’s the link to the poll so you can participate yourself. You might want to do this before you read the rest of this article. This way your responses won’t be biased.

The top three vote getters in this poll were the need to articulate a Compelling message, the ability to quickly convert your job opening into a Career move, and the Conviction that you won’t give up despite candidate reluctance to move ahead. The least important — at least according to the poll participants — were the need to Control the conversation, the ability to develop deep Connections, and Closing the deal, without money being the primary driver. If you’re a third-party recruiter you know this is upside down. Controlling, Connecting, and Closing are the most important. Without these, Compelling messages, Career opportunities, and Conviction won’t get you any more hires.

I’ll give the corporate recruiters who took the poll a break here since I didn’t define the 6Cs other than using the description shown on the chart. So let me better define and demonstrate why Controlling, Connecting, and Closing are the most important.

Why Control is #1 on the 6Cs Hit Parade

When first approached by a recruiter, passive candidates make a quick decision to engage in a conversation based on a few core pieces of information. keep reading…

Google+ launched over the summer for individuals, and will soon roll out tools for brands. If you already have a social strategy, you may be shrugging your shoulders or even ignoring this new tool. Because, why is Google+ any different than Facebook or LinkedIn? The answer is as simple as the modest circle.

One of the key differentiators of Google+ is the way you can group people or brands into Circles. This is no different from an individual’s ability to group friends on Facebook. The difference is that on Facebook fan pages or LinkedIn Groups, a brand cannot segment fans into groups. They are all fans. With Google+, a fan is not just a fan. In Google+, a fan can be so much more.

Breaking Down Social Audiences

In the social media landscape there are typically three types of followers or fans. They are: keep reading…

As Malcolm Gladwell points out is his bestseller The Tipping Point, little things can make a big difference. The same is true when it comes to finding, recruiting, and hiring passive candidates. One big thing recruiters can do is tame their hiring manager clients. Taming your hiring managers is an essential first step if you want to recruit passive candidates.

As was pointed out in a major study we did last year with LinkedIn, 82% of LinkedIn’s fully employed members characterize themselves as passive candidates. While they’d be open to talk with a recruiter, they are not interested in a lateral transfer, applying through your ATS, or working for a company that doesn’t know how to hire and develop talent. To find and hire these people, especially the best of the group, recruiters need to not only tame their hiring managers, but also employ the 6 Cs for recruiting passive candidates. These represents the key tipping points involved in any passive candidate search effort.

Over many (many) years, I’ve worked on search assignments with more than 500 different hiring managers on positions ranging from staff accountants and senior engineers to functional VPs, COOs, and CEOs of all stripes and sizes. From these experiences I’ve discovered a bunch of challenges that need to be addressed before you start looking for candidates. keep reading…

Over 700 million people are on Facebook, 200 million on Twitter and at least 100 million on LinkedIn. How many of them do you think are your prospects or candidates? People today are spending more time than ever in online networking sites, but they weren’t built for recruiters.

To reach them where they are spending their time online you need to control how you are perceived online where first impressions can make or break your attempt at engagement. As recruiters we often ignore social networks as a passive candidate outreach tool because we are unsure or confused about how to make our approach stick.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

There’s an old adage that you should treat candidates as customers. Somehow this has been forgotten in the current era of high unemployment and slow job growth. I’m going to reframe this idea and suggest that if you want to hire the best people possible, treat everyone as if they were a passive candidate. This is vital for candidates who are actually passive candidates. More important, treating everyone with the respect they deserve, including those who are active candidates, will fundamentally improve your overall quality of people you hire.

Here’s why.

For one thing, by treating everyone with respect they’ll all feel positive about your company’s selection process and your company. As a result, they’ll tell everyone in their network and post it on Glassdoor before the day is out. This is just commonsense, and common courtesy. In addition, this is a great technique for getting some great referrals. To do this, mention some non-competing jobs during the interview and ask if the person knows any top-notch people they’d refer, even those not looking.

Another important reason for treating all candidates with this type of respect is to increase assessment accuracy. Let’s be frank: the negative bias of being active or unemployed is hard to overcome, especially for hiring managers. The problem is that there are some very good people in these groups who could be outstanding hires if they were objectively assessed. Some corporate-level intervention akin to a blind audition is essential in order to measure these people properly.

While the feel-good idea of treating candidates as customers makes for good marketing jargon, most people just don’t know how to do it. Some company-level guidance can help here. Here are some ideas on how to operationalize this idea. These are essential if you want to hire passive candidates. As you’ll see, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be applied to all candidates regardless of their job-hunting status. keep reading…