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Are you perpetually recruiting? Then you should be perpetually sourcing. And, no surprise, there’s a sourcer’s tool for the recruiter who wants to find, build and maintain a relationship with future potential hires.

Version two of the popular Perpetual Sourcing web-based sourcing and CRM system was released last month. That might not ordinarily be news, but the enhancements and improvements are the result of a collaboration of Todd Davis, who developed the program, sourcing guru Shally Steckerl, and vendor Intelestream.

“This product is especially unique due to the level of industry expertise found at its core. As a senior recruiter with companies such as Microsoft, Google, Starbucks, and Yahoo, Todd Davis offered his knowledge to help us create his ‘dream solution.’ Shally Steckerl, founder of JobMachine consulting has also played an intricate role in collaborating on this project,” reports Intelestream’s Director of Marketing Stafford McKay. “It’s great to be right in line with the best practices taught by the experts.”

Davis has described Perpetual Sourcing as a pre-ATS applicant tracking system. An apt description for a system designed for the passive candidates found through LinkedIn, Spoke, Hoovers, Jigsaw, and ZoomInfo, all of which the system can automatically assess. It also can help source candidates via the search engines, managing your search strings for you. It also helps with OFCCP and EEOC compliance, by saving search histories, including locations searched, search strings used, and candidates sourced .

Because it is a CRM tool, it also manages contacts with the candidates. It synchronizes with Outlook and has direct email campaign capabilities.

Perpetual Staffing is based on SugarCRM, the commercial open source customer relationship management software that is in use worldwide by customers as varied as GoDaddy and North Carolina State University.

Davis developed Perpetual Sourcing in 2007 and offered it through PerpetualSourcing.com before transitioning the operations earlier this year to Chicago-based CRM consultant Intelestream.

This year in the recruiting industry there has been a lot of talk about how companies are tapping into Web 2.0 technologies to enhance their recruiting. But how is the candidate community also using these technologies for their own purposes, and what impact is it having on our recruiting strategies?

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A couple of weeks ago there was an ERE article comparing recruiting to dating. I recently had an experience of a different nature. I was on a plane returning from an engagement and a man named Ted sat down next to me. He spent the next 90 minutes trying to save my soul.

This was a waste of time.

Not that my soul isn’t worth saving. But it was a waste because I am very firm in my religious beliefs and am not about to change them because of a 90-minute conversation with someone.

It was not an unpleasant conversation. He seemed like a delightful man and we laughed at times as we talked. He was not going to change my mind, but I did respect his commitment. His dedication. He did not let go. Our flight took off at 5:45 in the morning and he was in full swing. He started the conversation before he had his seat belt buckled and he kept it up even as people were deplaning.

He was recruiting.

I was impressed with his zeal. Then again, he is recruiting for a very important cause. It occurred to me that he probably started up these conversations whenever he traveled. He was always looking for recruits, and to put this in recruiting parlance, he is frequently looking for “passive candidates.” He never rests in his search, as there are always openings in his organization. Was he effective? Not with me, but I wonder how many people he has successfully recruited. Lots, I would guess, from the extent of his travels. He has been all around the country and all around the world. He finds people wherever they are. That’s his mission, and that’s what his organization needs.

What’s your mission? Professionally speaking, what are you trying to accomplish? There’s a lot we can learn from Ted. Are you constantly recruiting? Do you strike up conversations with people on planes, in malls, or at events? Are you always trying to meet new people? In the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” the sales manager says selling is as simple as ABC: Always Be Closing. There are lots of similarities between selling real estate and recruiting, but that’s for another article.

Perhaps we need to create acronyms to remind us how to be successful recruiters. Maybe, if you’ve been finding yourself lax in the networking department, your ABC is “Always be connecting.” If your pipeline is drying up and you’re feeling frustrated, JKL - Just Keep Looking! Or NOP - Never Overlook Possibilities. But don’t compromise your standards. Remember PQR - Persistent Quality Recruiting. But be sure to MNO - Make Numerous Overtures if you’re going to EFGH - Effectively Find Good Hires. OK, I mean, okay, maybe I’m getting carried away, but we do need to remember that candidates don’t always present themselves neatly at our office door. We find them when and where we least expect them.

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There’s a new recruitment site where a candidate doesn’t need a resume, doesn’t need to say who they are, doesn’t even have to go looking for the job.

Some companies have made hires that way for years. It’s just that those “special” candidates are the boss’s relatives. For the rest of the world, the new site is an experiment in anonymous sourcing. It’s called Scopings and it sort of reminds us of those old computer dating programs. Candidates put in a little bit of information about themselves; employers put in a little more information.

The computer compares the candidates to the job description and suggests possible matches. Then the courting begins.

Only when both of you show enough signs of interest is the cloak of anonymity dropped. keep reading…

Consider this as a basic truth: in tough economic times every job looks better, especially the one you already have.

This would imply that during recessions there are fewer good people actively looking and it’s tougher to get the best passive consider to even discuss your career opportunity. If this is the case, one could conclude that the bulk of the people who are looking during economic downturns tend to be those who are unemployed or marginally employed.

Since this group does not represent the best-of-the-best, you’ll need to rethink your entire sourcing strategy to make sure it’s targeting the people you want to hire. Here’s a short video describing how good people enter the job market. Now here’s a quick test to determine how well you’re doing: if you’re seeing less good people than last year using the same sourcing techniques, stop using them!

However, if you do find a few good people, regardless of how you’re finding them, expect these candidates to have more objections and concerns than usual. And the better the candidate, the more objections the person has. So, if you can’t smoothly and professionally handle objections, you won’t be placing many top performers.

Here are some ideas on how to deal with some common objections. They’re more prevalent with the economy on shaky ground. The theme behind them all is to reveal very little information about your assignment until you have a complete understanding of the candidate’s background. By withholding information, you’ll gain candidate interest. This is the key to applicant control.

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Understanding human behavior can help you recruit more passive candidates.

When filling a job order, most recruiters search through virtual stacks of resumes hoping one stands out, matching most of the skills and experiences listed on the job description. When calling a person, the recruiter attempts to gain this same information by first describing the job and then asking the person to describe his or her background. If there’s a fit, the selling process begins.

If you want to hire more top performers, this is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing.

A little understanding of human nature and solution selling offers some guidance on how to approach passive candidates and quickly get them more interested in what you have to offer. If you follow the instructions closely, you’ll even be able to get two to three great referrals on each call. You’ll want these, especially if you decide you’re not interested in pursuing the candidate.

In the last sentence, pay notice to who decides to move forward or not. It should be the recruiter, not the candidate. If you’re letting your candidates decide if they’re interested in your opportunity, you’re not recruiting, you’re just box-checking and order-taking. Making this decision is the first part of the applicant control process essential to good recruiting.

For the sake of brevity and making a point, let me narrow the passive candidate recruiting process down to two small, but critical, first steps. The first relates to a candidate saying they’re not interested in considering your opportunity, even before you’ve told them anything about it.

The second relates to those who don’t say “no” right away, but instead ask about the comp, title, and location.

I’m sure you would agree that getting past these two pivotal points will dramatically increase the number of top candidates you put into your pipeline.

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I was never very good in science class, which is probably why I’m not a doctor today. Yet, I remember vividly the exercise on heated atoms. The experiment started with a flask of water and a Bunsen burner. When the flame from the Bunsen burner was applied to the flask, the atoms would dart all over the place in excitement. The excitement was uncontrollable. The energy remained as long as the heat was applied. As soon as the Bunsen burner was removed, the atoms moved back to a static state. All movement stopped.

This science experiment teaches a lot about recruiting “passive” sales candidates (those not presently looking for a job). All companies want to recruit the top-talent salespeople from other companies. However, that talent is usually locked in pretty tightly. The top salespeople are the best earners of the company, so they probably aren’t looking to leave. What would get them to leave? How do you find these candidates? What would energize passive sales candidates to be excited about another opportunity?

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Lack of planning and poor execution are the two most common causes of failure, whether it’s fighting a war, launching any type of business initiative, or reallocating recruiting resources. When business conditions change, appropriate planning and reallocation of effort becomes even more important. When done properly, you’ll be able to anticipate problems before they cause too much damage. From a recruiting perspective, this planning needs to start by understanding the mindset of potential candidates while they contemplate switching jobs as economic conditions worsen.

In a slowing economy, consumers tighten their belts a bit, reduce discretionary spending, eat at home more often, and decide to take fewer investment and career risks. This is a natural reaction to a negative change in economic conditions. Typically, those who have lost their jobs or those in jeopardy of losing theirs get more aggressive hunting for something new. They also become less discriminating as the steady paycheck becomes more important than the future opportunity.

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Passive candidates are different. They don’t look for jobs the same way as active candidates, they won’t return your calls unless you leave the right type of message and they certainly won’t meet your client unless you make a compelling case. In this hands-on webinar industry guru Lou Adler will guide you through the decision-making process of the passive candidate and what you must do to attract and keep their attention. If you’re currently recruiting passive candidates or would like to, this is one webinar you won’t want to miss. Some key topics Lou will address include:

• What you must know and do before you pick up the phone
• Passive candidate recruiting metrics and how to track your own performance
• What it takes to get your voice mails returned
• How to get every passive candidate to say “yes” to your offer
• 1st contact – how to breaking through the mental gatekeeper

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Passive candidates are, by definition, people who are not currently looking for a job. Despite this, most people in this category would be willing to discuss a new career opportunity if it offered some significant upside opportunity.

Since people in this category aren’t looking, you need to contact them, usually be phone. Getting them to call you back is far less than certain, and in most cases, those who do call you back aren’t appropriate for the job at hand.

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In today’s competitive search market, it may just take a bit more than a creative voicemail or a tasty phrase in your cold-call in order to entice a passive candidate to entertain a better opportunity.

Within my own very tight market in Hawaii, unemployment is at an all-time low and potential passive candidates deal with a barrage of cold-calls and emails from recruiters looking to fill positions with top talent. A more progressive strategy for finding these candidates could make all the difference in your search.

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Do you know that recruiting is one of the least efficient processes in an organization? Transaction costs (cost per hire) are large and there is almost no effort being made to connect that cost with delivering value (quality of hire).

At conference after conference, I hear the same old measures being touted proudly: cost per hire, time to fill, number of interviews to offer, and so forth. It seems like no one is measuring the effects of our recruiting activities. Senior executives are asking what value we are delivering to them, and sadly, few of us have any answers.

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We’re into the fourth week of our eight-week program on becoming a top 10% recruiter. By now, you should have taken the online recruiter diagnostic to benchmark your current performance. You might want to take it again to see how much you’ve improved so far.

Here’s the link to our Recruiting Challenges 2006 survey. This is one you’ll want to take. Participants will learn where they stand among their peers in both performance and compensation. Last week, ideas were presented as to what you needed to do to find more strong, active candidates. The key: Be different. Ads must have an engaging title and a compelling employee-value proposition. Ads that are just like everyone else’s or can’t be found are non-starters. If you want to hire top people, your ads must offer career opportunities, not just another job. These ads are just as important if you want to attract and hire top passive candidates. These top people will read your online posting to see if the job you’re offering is worth evaluating. So, if it isn’t anything special, the great recruiting and sourcing techniques described below will prove valueless. Let’s get real. I’m leading a search right now for a Fortune 500 group vice president of marketing for a consumer products company.

Without working too hard, I found 65 possible passive candidates on ZoomInfo, 27 on LinkedIn, and another 30 using a few Internet data-mining techniques Shally Steckerl taught me. It will take me approximately 31 hours (at 15 minutes each, on average) to call these 122 people and then recruit and qualify those I connect with. If history is any guide, 15-20 of these people will have been worth calling (meaning the person is a good person who is either very interested or knows someone who could be very interested), and from these, one to two people will wind up as candidates I’ll present to my client. This is a lot of work for such meager results.

On the other hand, if I call the best 20 candidates from all of the lists based on their titles and companies, get 75% to call me back, and get two or three prequalified referrals from each one, I can do this work in less than a day. Better yet, if I’m really good at getting these referrals, I should wind up with four or five very interested and highly qualified candidates. It will take another two days to process these referrals. So, in 75% of the time, I’m able to get more than three times as many top candidates. This is a 400% increase in productivity! And, that’s the secret to hiring more passive candidates: Be great at getting highly qualified referrals. You can prove this for yourself. Start tracking these metrics: number of cold calls per day, percentage of returned calls, number of people open to considering your opportunity, and the number of good referrals per call. Now, track the same metrics for these referrals. If you prequalify the referrals, you’ll discover that working the referred list is three to five times more productive than working the cold list. I’ve written about leaving voice mails and networking in previous ERE articles. Here are some highlights and other ideas you can use to improve your performance in recruiting passive candidates.

• You must know the job. You can’t be a good salesperson unless you know the product you’re representing. This is just as important for recruiters. The best recruiters know their jobs, sometimes even better than their clients. Reread Part 2 in this series for more on how to prepare performance profiles that describe what the person taking the job must do to be successful, not the skills the person must have. Knowing the job gives the recruiter the confidence to make the cold call to passive candidates and be able to quickly screen the person. Knowing the job is also the prerequisite to converting the cold recruiting call into a networking call.

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This could be a very good article, maybe even a great one. It all depends on your point of view. For the chance it turns out to be a great article, wouldn’t you agree that it’s certainly worth investing a few minutes’ reading time? Some of you are already aware that the title and first paragraph demonstrated a few fundamental aspects involved in successfully recruiting passive candidates. First, you must capture people’s interest. Second, you have to keep them engaged. Third, you need to make an offer that has a potential big reward for a minor cost.

How these ideas can be used to recruit passive candidates will become clearer by the end of this article. In fact, if too many of your voice mails aren’t being returned, you’ll be able to use this concept to get a 75% call-back return rate. To get better at recruiting passive candidates, you first need to assess yourself (or your team, if you’re a recruiting manager) against some best practices. You might find my earlier ERE article, “The 10 Commandments of Recruiting Passive Candidates,” to be a useful benchmark. From my experience, you don’t need to be fearless to make cold calls ó you just need to be better prepared. From a performance management standpoint, there are five basic metrics you need to track to see how well you’re doing recruiting passive candidates. Daily tracking is part of this, since it allows you to quickly determine how well your changes are working. For our purposes, passive candidates are people who are not actively looking for work ó so you need to call them.

1. Number of cold calls made per day. Whether you’re using a list developed using ZoomInfo, competitive intelligence, or some Shally Steckerl Internet data-mining technique, you should be able to leave 30-50 calls per day. Try to limit these calls only to worthy people based on their names, companies, and titles. Worthy people are those who are either potential candidates for your open position or those who personally know someone who would be.

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During my 25 years of recruiting experience, I’ve learned a few important principles about how to effectively recruit passive candidates. I would now like to pass these on to you. Most of these principles were learned by trial and error, and while they might not all be applicable to your specific situation, collectively, they offer a pretty decent road map of what it takes to hire more top passive candidates on a consistent basis. Your emailed thoughts on the usefulness of these principles in today’s market would be appreciated. Here are my 10 commandments for recruiting and hiring more top passive candidates:

1. You must know the job and why it’s exceptional. Top passive candidates who don’t know you will not speak to you for more than two or three minutes, nor give you any top referrals unless you know the job. Top passive people aren’t looking, so to get them to look, you must offer instant credibility with a job that offers significant upside potential. I suggest using a performance profile to define the real job. It describes the major challenges and problems required for job success. Recruiters who know the job this way are more confident when calling, and they can use the screening process to create an opportunity gap. This is the difference between the person’s current job and the new job.

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Someone once said that in this life, suffering is mandatory but misery is optional. I concur; but so many of us live day to day with more frustration, anxiety, and stress than is really necessary. We try to never lose a resume, to get back to every candidate and to attempt to close each and every deal. Often we try this all in the same day, and we wonder why we are half nuts by the time Friday rolls around. As recruiters, we build great businesses, and that is an awesome responsibility. As such, there are times when things simply do not go the way we would like them to go. That’s just how life works.

As a result, it is best to remember that we will ultimately be judged by the greater part of what we have accomplished as opposed to the alternative fragment where we have fallen short. The objective of recruiting, as in life, is to do the best you can and move on. Despite what you or anyone else might think, the future of western civilization will not depend on a given metric, the fleeting approval of an otherwise hysterical hiring manager, or on closing one particular deal. You do the best you can and then it is history. This is the only sane and sensible way in which to live. (If you want unconditional love, might I suggest you get a dog?) For those of you who have yet to understand that you can’t win them all and that being a great recruiter is not the same as being a martyr, I have put together a brief but comprehensive guide to being miserable. If you want to continue being miserable in this profession, then I urge you to consider the following.

Keep Searching for the Perfect Candidate

This one is my personal favorite, so I put it first. If ever there was a fool’s errand, this one is a shining star. Honestly now, do you really think that there is a perfect candidate? (Are you a perfect employee? Be honest. Shoot me an email; it will be our little secret.) Business needs change, management changes, projects change, and people change. Looking for the perfect candidate is the holy grail of so many recruiters, but in the end, all candidates, like us, are human. H. Jackson Brown, Jr., author of the bestseller Life’s Little Instruction Book, says, “Strive for excellence, not perfection.” This is an excellent way to think. Can you even imagine if every candidate you found was excellent, and therefore turned into an excellent employee? If you’re tired of the chase for the perfect candidate, just find and present excellent candidates and call it a day. The perfect candidate, like the perfect mate (John Sullivan?) is just an illusion, so let it be someone else’s obsession, not yours.

Beat Yourself Up Over the Deals That Did Not Close

I like this almost as much as the first one. I once asked an audience I was speaking to if they wanted to close every single deal. They said, “No.” My next question was to ask, “Which deals do you want to lose?” No one had an answer and no one spoke. Let’s face it: We want to close every deal! This is okay ó I feel the same way ó but it’s just not going to happen. Losing a deal, putting it behind you, and moving forward takes guts, but sometimes it is all you can do. The famous philosopher, lawyer and orator Robert Ingersoll said, “The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.” This is what we as recruiters must do. Simply stated, we must move on, close the next deal, and be glad for that.

Expect All Hiring Managers to Take Your Advice

Perhaps this happens in recruiter heaven, but to those of us anchored on Planet Earth, this is simply not one of life’s realities. Hiring managers come with all of the baggage and blemishes that you and I have (all right, sometimes more). The bottom line is there are some hiring managers who will take your advice, and others who seem to have the need to do it their way and hope for the best. This will never change with some of them, despite your great track record or their abysmal one. Have you ever noticed that hiring managers who tell you things like, “I have been hiring for 60 years,” are usually the worst at making things happen, and then when things fall apart, they tell you they didn’t really want the candidate in the first place? I suggest that you focus your time, expertise, and emotional energy on those who will make you a partner and let you do your job. For further information on dealing with hiring managers, see my articles 8 Secrets to Dealing with Non-Responsive Hiring Managers and 12 Ways Hiring Managers Can Get More from Their Recruiting Partners.

Assume That Recruiting Passive Candidates Will Be Easy

This is probably the godfather of all bad assumptions. We have learned how to find candidates on the Internet. We then call with a big smile in our voice, a song in our heart, and a great opportunity that we can present. We expect the candidate we found to say, “Would I be open to hearing about a better situation? Of course I would!” and to come right down and interview. Instead, the candidate never even calls back. You call again, and the candidate still does not call back. You finally get the candidate on the phone and they are not interested. Now what? Don’t get me wrong; recruiting passive candidates is not optional. It’s mandatory, and it’s a great thing to do because it presents your organization with a totally different pool of candidates. I am sure that you will even manage to hire some great employees by doing this. On the other hand, recruiting passive candidates it is not easy for a host of different reasons.

Never Try Anything New

Recruiting is both art and science; some days more art, some days more science. Given that, I urge you to consider the following:

• Great artists are constantly reaching out for the new and the different in the hope of reinventing what they do and how they do it. If you always say the same things, use the same approaches, and employ the same solutions, you will never develop the edge that separates good recruiters from great ones.

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This article is exactly 1,000 words long. It contains instructions on how to draw a picture. Drawing the picture will have a profound affect on your ability to think strategically. It will also make you a better recruiter. Now grab a pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

First, draw a circle approximately four inches in diameter. Label this “The Hiring Landscape.” Now draw three one-inch diameter circles within the larger circle: one close to the top, one in the middle, and one at the bottom. Label the top one “The Hiring Team,” the middle one “The Recruiting Team,” and the bottom one “The Candidate Pool.” Within the hiring team circle, put a bunch of dots representing the number of different people involved in making the hiring decision. Make some of these dots blue, indicating how many people on the team know the job, can interview accurately, and can recruit top talent.

In the recruiting circle, put the number of people servicing the hiring team. Usually this is one to three — including a recruiter, a sourcer, and an admin person. Fill up the candidate pool with as many dots as there are candidates. Make three or four of these dots red. These are the people you want to hire. Now begin by answering this question: “Why is it so hard to consistently hire top people?” If you didn’t look at the picture, you’d come up with stuff like:

• Too much competition for top talent

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