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:

• What does passive mean?
• Are “passive candidates” better qualified than active candidates?
• Are “passive candidates” perfect?
• Do “passive candidates” even know they are passive?
• Are “passive candidates” just acting passive and playing the recruiting game?
• Do hiring managers even know what passive means, or are they following another trend?
• Has a “passive candidate” ever been hired and then performed poorly, or are they all major rock stars?
• On a company employment application, where is the check box that asks whether one is passive or active?
• Is there something wrong with being an active seeker?
• What is most important to you in making your next hire?
• Why does it seem that some of these “passive candidates” seem to change companies like it’s nobody’s business?
• How come when I am speaking to a “passive candidate” and ask that individual what other opportunities they are currently looking at, the list is most of the time extensive?

Passive, active, semi-active, inactive, submissive, reactive, retired, separated, etc. — shouldn’t we want to hire the best and most qualified individuals for our positions? Don’t we want to seek out and hire those who possess the strengths to improve the organization?

Right now, there are individuals knocking at our doors, and while not all of them are qualified, a lot of them are very qualified. Yet, a lot of these individuals are facing discrimination by hiring managers and recruiters who want someone who is working or someone who is passive. I have yet to see any study or statistical data that proves passive candidates to be more qualified, make better employees, or add additional value than those employees in the “other” categories.

I am after the most qualified individuals for my positions. I hire for experience, qualifications/strengths, and fit. I have never asked whether an individual is passive or not because to me it doesn’t matter. If you have the skills, meet the criteria of the position, and are determined to be a fit, then there is a great possibility in making a match.

I recently completed an internal search for an executive-level position in one of our most prestigious business units. After taking the order and obtaining full details, I started my search process. Fast forwarding to the end, I presented five candidates in my final slate: two passive, two semi-active, and one active. The end result — the active candidate received the offer after a thorough and extensive interview process.

It turns out this active individual came from a competing company who had shut its local doors months prior. To no fault of her own, a little bad luck had her now in a position that she had never been in before — in active search mode. In my own evaluation, I found her to be no less qualified than other passive candidates I interviewed for this same role. In fact, she was the most qualified and turned out to be the best fit.

I call on my fellow HR and talent leaders to not follow trends or fashions. Rather, stick to and follow the fundamentals of recruiting and search, build relationships, treat others well, hire for skill set, fit, and strengths, interview like a pro, and lastly maintain an open mind.

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.

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.

You might find it useful as you compare this to your company’s approach to passive candidate recruiting.

Lou’s Rules for Finding, Recruiting, and Hiring Passive Candidates

1. Review your hiring process workflow. The process used to find, recruit, assess, and hire passive candidates is fundamentally different than the one used for active candidates. Make sure you’re using the right one.
2. Engage your hiring manager. If your hiring manager is not totally committed to hiring outstanding people, don’t bother with recruiting passive candidates. You won’t hire any, so don’t waste your energy. Post an ad instead, and hope for the best.
3. Convert jobs into career opportunities. There is not one top passive candidate on the planet who is interested in a lateral transfer, so stop using job descriptions that list skills, duties, responsibilities, and competencies for recruiting or advertising purposes. Instead, define the big challenges of the job and the impact the person can make. We call these performance profiles.
4. Only use compelling ads and emails. Passive candidates will always check out the job posting once they decide to find out more. That’s why the job posting itself must address the career-oriented mentality of the passive candidate. Here’s an example of a position we recently posted on LinkedIn that meets all of the requisite standards. Notice how skills are presented.
5. Develop a workforce plan for all critical positions. It’s difficult enough to find, recruit, and hire passive candidates. It’s worse if you don’t have enough time to do it right. You should know today whom you need to hire over the next 3-6 months for every critical position in your company.
6. Prepare a sequenced sourcing plan. Before you begin looking, you need a plan outlining all of the likely sourcing channels sequenced to maximize quality of hire in the shortest time to fill and at the lowest cost. Start with a supply vs. demand analysis by geography in combination with a compensation analysis for top performers.
7. Create an ideal candidate persona. Define your target prospect from all perspectives including demographics, 360° connections, career and personal needs, decision criteria, job-hunting status, and the most likely companies to source from. If you don’t know who you’re looking for, you’ll waste a lot of time in all the wrong places.
8. PERP your ERP and create a VTC. Get your employees to proactively connect (the P in PERP) with all of the best people they’ve ever worked with in the past. Then when you start asking for employee referrals (the ERP) for a specific position you’ll already have the best lined up. Collectively, this network represents a Virtual Talent Community (VTC).
9. Only call people who are qualified and who will call you back. Getting pre-qualified referrals is the key to passive candidate recruiting. Getting someone credible, like a co-worker, to tell you about a great person with whom they’ve worked in the past is like gold. For one thing, they’ll call you back. For another, you already know they are perfectly qualified.
10. Network, network, network following the 80/20 rule. Great recruiters don’t see LinkedIn simply as a list of 140mm+ people. To them it’s a one-degree connection to every top person in the world. That’s why getting 2-3 pre-qualified people on every call is essential. Then spend 80% of your time only calling these pre-qualified referrals, and get 2-3 more people on each of these subsequent calls.
11. Bridge the gap on first contact. Whenever you call a passive prospect the person will always ask about “Day 1” criteria (salary, location, title, company) to see if it’s worth discussing. Yet when the person accepts an offer the “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria (career growth, team, cultural fit, total rewards, work/life balance, team) trounces the Day 1 stuff. Bridging this gap in the first five minutes is the key to successful passive candidate recruiting.
12. Maintain applicant control from first contact until the start date. You need to ensure full disclosure, but too often passive prospects opt-out too early for all the wrong reasons. Candidates need to see your job as a true career opportunity, and one that they have to fight to get. You achieve this through applicant control: staying the buyer, not the seller.
13. Formalize the final candidate decision-making process at the beginning. After you bridge the gap on first contact, the prospect must recognize that the process you suggest he/she uses to compare and select opportunities should be based on three sets of criteria: Day 1, Year 1, and Beyond. We’ll walk you through the form we use in our training, if you’re interested.
14. Don’t take “No” for an answer. Persistence is the hallmark of the passive candidate recruiter. No matter what you do, the best candidates will always have concerns and objections. The key: uncover the concern, validate it, and then address it. Sometimes you’ll lose for the right reasons. Losing for the wrong reasons is a shame.
15. Close on career opportunity, not compensation. Use the assessment to look for differences between what you need accomplished in comparison to what the person has achieved. The gap represents the career growth opportunity for the person. As long as this gap is big enough, compensation will become secondary.
16. It’s not over until it’s over. Don’t stop recruiting just because the candidate has accepted your offer. The person will get a counteroffer or an offer from someone who just discovered your great passive candidate is looking. Get the hiring manager and the hiring team involved during this time between the acceptance and start date. Idea: review the performance profile and get the person to start planning out the big projects.

From beginning to end, the process for finding, recruiting, and hiring passive candidates is fundamentally different from the one used for active candidates. If hiring great people is important to your company’s success, the process used to recruit passive candidates should become your company’s default method, not the exception. Imagine the difference this would make.

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:

…I’ve been doing this for a while and I’ve never worked with anyone in an HR capacity who took the time to inform, support, and strategize with a candidate the way that you guys did with me. It’s obvious that you all care about the candidate as much as the company you work for, and that’s very rare. I really appreciate all the time you took with me to help me try and succeed.

The second note came from a candidate who received an offer on a different position. Here is a snippet from that note:

…I can’t begin to tell you how great the experience I have just completed was. The entire candidate process from start to finish was great and in speaking with everyone involved, they all treated me with dignity and respect when I felt I was at the lowest point of my professional career. I tell you this not to sound self-indulging, but the truth is that I had other offers on the table, but I chose the opportunity with your company simply based on how well you all treated me. There was simply no question in my mind where I needed to be.

Although one candidate received an offer and the other did not, both completed the process with a positive view of the organization, our people culture, and how we treat prospective candidates. The point is that there is a good candidate experience and then there is an awesome candidate experience.

If you want an awesome candidate experience, here are some tips for you to incorporate into your current process. These points come from feedback I have received over the years from numerous candidates and individuals that I have had the pleasure to meet and work with:

• Hire for skill set and fit — in these uncertain economic times, good people have lost their jobs. We recently hired two A+ candidates who were both unemployed for several months due to layoffs at their former companies. And while there is a lot of attention and focus on finding “passive candidates,” there is way too much focus on it. Bottom line: hire the most qualified individual for the position. What difference should it make if an individual is employed or not? Through a proper interview and selection process, you should be able to make a thorough and informed decision on whether the individual is right for your organization.
• Do what you say — the classic line of the recruiter who has no guts or respect for others is “We’ll be in touch.” The fact is, no you won’t. Disposition each candidate who is rejected and/or properly communicate with them; return emails/phone calls, follow up, etc. Occasional individuals will slip through the cracks. But in the end, a no is better than nothing.
• Know your candidate — if you have selected an individual for an interview, there is more to know about them than what is on paper. Ask about them, what makes them tick, their hobbies. Have an open, friendly and genuine conversation and get to know the person. You will be amazed at what giving an individual one minute of your time can do, especially to those who are down on their career luck.
• Build a relationship — no one says you have to be best friends. Be friendly, approachable, and inviting. None of us know what the future holds and we have all heard the timeless story of good fortune coming around to those who help and give to others. Whether you believe in that or not, that is up to you. But I can tell you from personal experience, good things come to those who give back.
• Provide return value — recruiters in general cannot help everyone directly — meaning we cannot help every single person we meet get a job for various reasons. But if you have the opportunity, and cannot help a candidate with direct value, provide the candidate with some type of indirect value. For example, you can provide resume advice, interview tips, career planning, referrals to other organizations who may be hiring, or you can simply provide an ear.
• Treat others how you want to be treated — my wonderful mother taught me this tactic at an early age and it has never done me wrong. Place yourself in the shoes of those going through the applicant/hiring process and keep in mind that a career transition is one of the most stressful events one can go through in life. A little personal touch to your candidate experience can go a long way.

2012 is nearly upon us. What will be your professional resolution? I challenge all of us in this industry to take what we are currently doing from a candidate experience perspective and square it. You will see the long-term results in not only your recruiting operations but over the long run in goodwill, friendships, and networking.

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.

Recruiting Workflow Active vs. Passive: the recruiting process to source and hire active candidates is fundamentally different than what’s required to hire passive candidates. Passive candidates go slower, take more time to decide to become a candidate, and won’t follow traditional approaches. Most companies use a “surplus of candidates” model to design their workflow. If you want to hire top-notch passive candidates in any volume, you must use a “talent scarcity” model –otherwise your efforts are wasted. (Here’s a link to some upcoming webcasts that gets into this in more depth.)

Job Descriptions vs. Performance Profiles. Unless you have a big employer brand, passive candidates will only consider career moves even to engage in a short exploratory conversation. So if you tell the person about the job before you know anything about the candidate, you’ve lost the opportunity to recruit the person, make the job bigger, or get referrals. Since traditional job descriptions describe lateral transfers, they must be banished as part of a talent scarcity talent acquisition approach, and never, ever discussed in the first 30 minutes of the conversation. Here’s how to do this.

Consider the Pace — It’s Much Slower! For top people, especially passive candidates, the decision to change jobs is a strategic decision based on more “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria rather than “Day 1.” As shown in the graphic, this takes extra time. To pull this off recruiters must use consultative selling every step of way, fashioning a career move for the candidate as part of the process. Unfortunately, too many recruiters use a transactional sales approach trying to fill reqs by offering lateral transfers with a salary bump — all Day 1 stuff. Note: when dealing with passive candidates, for a recruiter being “results-oriented” needs to be more about advancing the process along the path and hiring top talent vs. getting positions filled quickly. (Also note: this is where a common competency like being “results-oriented” can have a totally different meaning on-the-job and typically results in the wrong type of recruiter being hired.)

Applicant Control. This is one of our core recruiter competencies described in our Corporate Recruiter Competency Model. The keys: stay the buyer, get the candidate to sell you, and you determine if you’re interested in the candidate before the candidate has a chance to say no. You must maintain applicant control to ensure the candidate makes a “Year 1 and Beyond” career decision. Here’s how to establish and maintain applicant control.

Don’t call anyone who won’t call you back, or isn’t qualified. For the newbie recruiter, LinkedIn is a database of 140mm+ names. For a seasoned headhunter it’s a one-degree connection to every top person on the planet. If you know how to network, you’ll be able to find out about every one of your connections’ connections and pre-qualify each one before calling. Then only call the best. They’ll call you back, too, if you mention how they got their name. Done properly, you should be able to generate a short list of qualified candidates in a few days. Here’s more on how to do this.

If you’re interested in improving your passive candidate recruiting game, start by reengineering your processes from a scarcity of talent perspective. Part of this is hiring recruiters who use a consultative approach to recruiting vs. a transactional sales approach. We’re hosting a number of webcasts in 2012 describing this difference. After you attend them, try out the ideas. You’ll discover they work. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it, otherwise it’s déjà vu all over again.”

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.

Using Avature, adidas built a portal to capture some of these passive candidates. If you haven’t heard of Avature — it’s a bit like Jobvite, in that it’s in the “CRM” business — an acronym that may sound familiar but in recruiting many folks consider the “C” to stand for Candidate, not Customer, Relationship Management.

Anyhow, the project was rolled out at a large footwear/apparel event. To drive people to the site, adidas put up a display (see photo above) with a QR code you could scan, and handed out small (3 x 5) cards with the QR code on them. Show attendees could thus discretely take a photo of the QR code and then type their contact info into the portal. The candidate information was collected and divvied up to adidas recruiters by function, like design, for them to contact people.

Larson’s excited about this as a way to build a relationship, a pipeline of candidates, to start talking to people who might be candidates. And, he says, it showed hiring managers that the adidas recruiting team could get to recruits without a lot of recruiters, and without a recruiting event. Says Larson, figuratively: “Basically we have a recruiter on site with this banner.”

He is still working on a full analysis, putting solid numbers on the project. In the meantime, he says, “it was a vast improvement over last year when we didn’t use technology to support us. In the future this will be a cost savings, time savings, and the ROI will continue to grow.”

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:

1. The company’s talent acquisition and development strategy is out of alignment with its business strategy and operating plans.
2. Lack of understanding of how the actual customer, in this case the passive candidate, decides to engage with a company and eventually accept an offer. Since there is a disproportionate percentage of top people in the passive pool, this is a critical shortcoming.
3. The workflow and recruiting methods to find and hire passive candidates is fundamentally different than for active candidates. Unfortunately, most companies try to mishmash the two together, and wonder why neither one works too well.
4. Overreliance on a big employer brand that hides process inefficiencies and narrows the selection criteria based on past hires rather than current and future business conditions.
5. The decision-making process to hire or not hire someone is flawed, and does not fully address the fundamental reasons why top people underperform. Typically these involve style problems with the hiring manager, lack of clarification around total job needs including available resources, and a superficial assessment of cultural and environmental fit.

Aligning Talent Acquisition Strategies, Plans, and Processes

Addressing the lack-of-alignment problem starts by examining each factor involved in the process. Start with these core components to see how well-aligned your company is. As you read through the descriptions, you’ll quickly see how lack of alignment on any of these factors creates inefficiency, lost opportunity, and problems with attracting, hiring, and retaining the best. One example will highlight problems causes by lack of alignment: a passive-candidate program to target world-class design innovators will fall short if the compensation is based on group averages instead of best in class. I’m sure you’ll see similar problems at your company as you read the list.

Business Strategy. The long-term business plan combined with current operating plans needs to drive every aspect of a company’s talent acquisition program. When the business strategy changes, everything else has to change in domino-like fashion, including the talent acquisition strategy. Since talent acquisition is so critical, if it doesn’t flex quickly with changes in a company’s business strategy, it becomes the tail wagging the dog.

Talent Acquisition Strategy. This needs to support the business strategy with emphasis on ensuring that the best people are put into critical roles. A quality-of-hire target for each job category should further refine this, with specific targets for all managerial, professional, staff, and rank-in-file positions. If you’re a recruiter and don’t know this for your assignments, either you’re not working the hot jobs, or your recruiting department is out of sync with the business it’s supporting.

Workforce Planning. A workforce plan allows a company to develop internal mobility and succession planning programs, and from this, determine external needs by class of jobs. Different sourcing programs are then developed depending on candidate demand vs. local supply, and whether candidates are active or passive. A workforce plan is the first step involved in turning a talent acquisition strategy into a operating plan, so if you don’t have one, you’re missing an important connecting link.

Sourcing Strategy by Job Category. A passive candidate sourcing program is far different than one designed for active candidates. Active is generally higher volume and based on a “find-and-apply” model. A passive candidate program is more targeted, including focused messages, and a multi-step “career discovery and matching process” before the candidate agrees to be a candidate.

Active and Passive Candidate Recruiting Workflow. This is a huge tipping point, and even if the planning and strategy development is appropriate, it often falls apart at the execution level. The key is to have at least two different workflow branches. The passive candidate branch would focus more on the prospect’s needs, involve a formal means to “bridge the gap” at first contact to ensure candidates never opt-out without full information, include pre-interview exploratory conversations with the hiring manager, and a career-based closing and negotiating process.

Of course, there are still a bunch of other HR/recruiting issues that need to be included as part of this talent acquisition program, but these are the big ones (here’s a link to the full list). Doing the up-front talent strategy and planning and then executing against this plan is why doing this right is important. Surprisingly, many companies react to changes in hiring needs rather than plan for them. This is equivalent to putting the cart before the horse, doing the doing before the thinking, or firing before aiming.

While most companies complain they can’t find enough top talent, the root cause is more likely a lack of alignment with the company’s business strategy and talent acquisition programs. If you don’t have enough recruiters, if hiring managers aren’t held accountable, if compensation determines who gets hired, if your ATS establishes your workflow, or if some corporate lawyer says you have to write a boring ad, you are experiencing the problem first hand. Collectively all of these practices and processes are built upon a surplus-of-candidates mentality. The idea behind this approach is to attract as many unqualified people as you can, and hope that a good person falls through the cracks.

Alternatively, you could build your talent programs on a scarcity-of-talent model. In this approach, the needs of the best people determine the workflow, not a DBA. To get a sense of a talent-centric approach, consider how some of your recent best hires made it through the maze. As you review what happened, don’t be surprised that someone “modified” your company’s basic processes to meet the person’s needs. Commonsense would then suggest that you make the talent-centric approach the default rather than the exception. This is a great way to start aligning your talent acquisition programs to meet your company’s business strategy.

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…

Expecting dull position descriptions to attract — potential applicants assume that the company puts its best foot forward when it describes a job. So when they compare your dull, legalistic description with your competitor’s more compelling description, they will simply apply elsewhere. The net result is that you lose candidates unnecessarily, harm your employer brand, and you will eventually frustrate your hiring managers.

Not taking advantage of employee referrals — the best-practice firms approach 50% referral hires (the percentage of all external hires who come from referrals). Failing to fully use referrals means that you will miss out on a large number of high-quality, prescreened, and presold candidates. Because employees are no longer doing some of the recruiting work, your recruiting workload will increase.

Not learning the business — obviously if you can’t speak “their language” and you don’t understand their problems, hiring managers will be less responsive to your requests. Your lack of knowledge will also make it more difficult to communicate with, to sell, and to build relationships with candidates.

Using the same recruiting process for different level jobs — higher-level jobs require a different level of service, knowledge, and relationship-building. So using the same process that you use for lower-level jobs on more sophisticated, technical, or management jobs will result in fewer returned calls, a higher candidate dropout rate, and lower-quality hires.

Making slow hiring decisions — the very best candidates are gone quickly, so a drawn-out process or slow decision-making will likely mean that candidates with multiple offers will be gone. Managers will also become frustrated if a slow recruiting process means losing the best.

Assuming interviews are accurate — interviews are traditionally weak predictors but poorly executed interviews dramatically increase the chances of making a major hiring error. Poorly designed interviews may also screen out innovators and turnoff top candidates, because they have not felt challenged.

Using active sourcing approaches for passive candidates — posting your jobs using active sourcing approaches like job boards, newspaper ads, and job fairs means that the 75% of the workforce that is not actively looking for a job will never see them.

Not prioritizing jobs — focusing on low-value jobs with little business or revenue impact will anger your managers and reduce their business results. It may eventually lead to lower recruiting budgets, after executives see that your hiring is not prioritized and in line with their business priorities.

Not identifying job acceptance criteria — if you don’t proactively ask for their job acceptance criteria, you can only guess about what it will take to get a top candidate to say “yes.” Although it is ranked as #10, not tailoring your recruiting marketing and candidate-selling approaches to the decision criteria of top candidates almost guarantees that you will lose these candidates. Because these individuals have choices, they will simply wait until an opportunity comes along that precisely fits their requirements and expectations.

Final Thoughts

Nearly 80% of CEOs select talent management as the business area that requires the most change. As a recruiter, if you are going to dramatically change, you have only two basic choices, 1) stop doing the dumb things that negatively impact your results or 2) start doing smarter and more effective things. The “stop doing dumb things” choice is probably the easier of the two because it doesn’t require you to learn anything new.

So if you are recruiter or recruiting manager with limited time and resources, we recommend that you use this “dumb things” list to begin the process of changing and improving your recruiting.

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.

Here a just a few of the big ones:

Some Big Workflow Changes Required to Support a Passive Candidate Early-bird Sourcing Strategy

1. Elimination of traditional skills-and-experience-laden job descriptions for recruiting advertising purposes. To be effective, voice mails, emails and job postings need to emphasize the long-term value proposition of the job plus some of types of projects the person will be working on.
2. Implementation of a “sequence of steps” recruiting model including a career discovery process vs. a transactional (“find and apply”) hiring process. This represents the heart of the workflow changes required and why different recruiting skills are essential. Passive candidates evaluate job changes using a hybrid of long- and short-term criteria. Collecting this information often takes multiple meetings and discussions with the hiring manager. This is fundamentally different than active candidates who have an economic need driving their decision-making.
3. Development of virtual talent communities driven by proactive In-Out employee referral programs. An In-Out auto-matching referral program is a relatively new concept. The idea is to automatically connect a newly opened job with the company’s employees’ pre-qualified first-degree connections. The purpose of this is to push compelling career messages (an outbound process) to people who are not looking. Typical talent communities are comprised of active candidates who have signed-up (inbound) to follow the company.

 Highlights of a Recruiter Competency Model for Passive Candidates

Recruiting passive candidates requires more talented and tenacious recruiters. We’ve developed a complete, multi-factor passive candidate recruiter competency model with a detailed ranking score to help recruiting leaders assess their teams. Email me if you’d like a sample version of the full recruiter competency model, but following are the essential factors (a warning to recruiting leaders: do not allow your recruiters to contact passive candidates unless they possess these skills):

1. Partners with Hiring Manager: recruiters don’t have much credibility with a top person who’s not looking, if they don’t know the hiring manager extremely well. More important, if the recruiter and hiring manager are not both working in tandem, it’s impossible to move top people through the sequence of discovery steps mentioned above.
2. Someone Worth Knowing and Subject Matter Expert: recruiters must know the company strategy, the company’s basic financial strength, the industry and where the company stands, the competition and why the company is better positioned, and all of the associated compensation and benefit issues. When a recruiter contacts a person who’s not looking — especially the best ones — these prospects are deciding not only if the career opportunity is worth pursuing, but also if the recruiter is credible.
3. Develops and Implements Customized Sourcing and Networking Programs: as shown in the graphic above, those who aren’t looking need to be contacted directly either via email, through networking, or employee referral. Getting the names of these people is easy. However, getting on the phone and developing deep networks of highly qualified prospects is the difference between having a list of names and some great prospects open to talking with a hiring manager.
4. Understands Real Job Needs and Associated Career Opportunity: passive candidates will always want to know a few things about the job just to determine if it’s worth a serious discussion. Recruiters must be able to present this on multiple levels, including the job’s importance, some of the key projects and tasks involved, the impact of these on the company’s business plans, and why it represents a career move for the right person. Most recruiters drop the ball here, and not only lose a potentially strong candidate, but also a great networking opportunity.
5. Accurately Assesses Competency, Motivation, and Fit: recruiting passive candidates involves not only thorough job knowledge, but also the ability to assess the prospect’s ability and motivation to do this work. A key part of this is determining cultural, job, and managerial fit. Since these candidates aren’t looking, good assessment skills allows the recruiter to compare actual job requirements to the candidate’s background, and credibly demonstrate why the job represents a career move.
6. Recruits, Advises, Negotiates, and Closes Top Prospects: Persuading top prospects who are not looking, getting them to engage in a series of career discussions, pushing the process along, and then closing the deal on equitable terms is what recruiting passive candidates is all about. Collectively this is represented by the 6Cs of Passive Candidate Recruiting. Very few of these overlap with the skills required to find and recruit active candidates.

Unless you have a big employer brand, it’s impossible to attract the 83% of fully-employed professionals who aren’t looking using the same sourcing and recruiting techniques used for the 17% who are. These are two different worlds, and while most recruiting leaders recognize the difference, I find it puzzling that only a few are willing to do anything about it.

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.

This hierarchy approach will be further refined over the next few months, but for now use these guidelines to figure out where your company stands and what you need to do to become a social media maven. (We’re hosting a webcast with Jobvite on November 3, 2011, describing the Social Media Pyramid in more depth.)

Novice: to rank at this inglorious bottom level all you need to have are Facebook and LinkedIn company pages with your boring job descriptions posted in some illogical and uninteresting order. Now all you need to do is to get people to follow you, with these followers regularly pinged via Twitter or the social media’s site internal pinging machine when a job is opened. Despite what any vendor tells you, this type of social media program is designed to stay in touch with active candidates who have excess time on their hands. If you have a big employer magnet, it might be all you need, though.

Minimalist: to move past Novice on the social media pyramid you need to have some type of CRM system driving your messaging and do at least two other things. First, be a little different. Second, be found.

At one level being different means your social media site is more robust; perhaps it has a game or something unique to keep prospects engaged, maybe the company vision/mission is presented in more compelling terms; or, best of all, the jobs themselves are a little bit more exciting. Being found, especially for the SMBs, means someone can find your company by searching on Google or one of the job aggregators with just a job title and a location without your company name. If you can’t get this part right, just think of how many prospects aren’t seeing your job postings.

Progressive: now we’re starting to get serious. Being serious starts by implementing a hub-and-spoke model for your social media efforts where prospects are driven via aggressive marketing programs to your page, microsite, group, or circle. The idea is to group all similar jobs into a master job class — for example, all hydraulic design engineers from mid- to senior-level — and then differentiate how you manage each of these master classes. From these master or landing pages you need to offer unique content and drive prospects to specific jobs as they open up via robust CRM systems (differentiated messages depending on master class and the prospect’s job-seeking phase).

In addition to the hub-and-spoke approach, true Progressives offer a means to easily connect prospects directly with employees they know both before a req is open, as well as after. At the Progressive stage social media metrics enter the picture. Tracking source of candidate opt-in and hire rates by channel allows for both the appropriate allocation of resources and as a means to improve the content and process.

Maven: aside from doing all of the above, Mavens realize that true passive candidates, especially the best, aren’t going to partake in the social media shenanigans in similar fashion to active candidates. Differentiation at the job level is critical for success at the Maven level. For one thing, just consider that the best passive candidates won’t even consider another position unless it represents a true career move. In this case a laundry list of traditional job postings won’t get much attention.

On top of the messaging, the process passive candidates use to engage, compare, and select the best of competing opportunities must also be different. From a social media perspective it means the job titles must be enticing, the job description themselves compelling, and the methods of attracting and staying in contact unique. It goes without saying that the process used to connect jobs with prospects through a company’s ERP system is automatic, robust, and professional. Very few companies are at this level, so if you’re one of them, you’re certain to become an ERE finalist.

World Leader: following are the most important components of a social media World Leader program. As you review the factors, rank yourself from bad to great to give your company some type of initial benchmark. If you rank outstanding on each of these measures, not only will you be a certain ERE Spring 2012 finalist, but probably the top dog award-winner, as well.

• Career-focused messaging: if you don’t have a big employer name, assume all you’re attracting are active candidates unless all of your emails, job postings, Twitters, chats, and voice mail clearly describe career opportunities.
• Auto Outbound PERP: a proactive ERP means your employees are formally connecting with the best people they’ve worked with in the past. This is important, since with “Auto Outbound PERP” once a req is opened your employees are notified if they have any strong first-degree matches. This auto-outbound ERP system is more effective since it drives passive candidate referrals, while an inbound auto-ERP process allows active candidates to find employees they are connected to.
• Virtual Talent Community: Whichever company has the best passive candidates directly connected to their employees will win the new war for talent. Building talent pipelines of active candidates is great for filling positions quickly, but not for raising a company’s overall talent level. A VTC by class of job requires aggressive PERPing, great recruiters, true career opportunities, fully engaged hiring managers, and a competitive compensation structure.
• Interactive CRM: Most recruiting CRM systems offer nothing more than the ability to deliver a series of timed, group-based messages. Direct marketing-based CRM systems have the ability to send a series of sequences and semi-individualized messages to prospects based on their job-hunting status and interests. In some ways this is akin to a virtual recruiter assigned to each prospect in your VTC.
• An aligned talent-centric strategy and tactics: The criteria top people (whether active or passive) use to initially engage with a company is different than what’s used to decide whether to accept an offer or not. The former is more about compensation, title/company, and location. The latter is more about growth and opportunity. On top of this, most companies use the same apply/assess/recruit/close process for both passive and active candidates. No matter what social media programs you use, this mismatch will preclude companies from attracting and hiring as many top performers as possible.

Developing a series of social media recruiting programs should be part of an overall talent acquisition strategy. Based on what I’ve seen, most companies instead assign the role to someone who’s social-media savvy, rather than a person who is charged with developing a companywide program for improving quality of hire. As Magic Johnson said at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect, strategy drives tactics, not the other way around. This seems like good advice whether you’re playing basketball, running a company, or climbing the ranks of the Social Media Pyramid.

The Medium vs the Message

There’s more going on offline than online.

A key finding of the research is that social networking is done more offline than online; the most common type of social networking is face-to-face or over the phone. This is a tough pill to swallow for those who worship the god of digital media, but the conventional wisdom is based on confusing the medium with the message. Social networking is what people are naturally driven to do; online social media is just the mechanism through which it’s done.

One size does not fit all. The research shows that social networkers have different reasons why they use their networks. These reasons are intrinsic to each individual: if you want to engage with them you need to tailor your message to them. If your social media initiatives are designed to reach the widest possible audience, then there’s a lot who will simply tune it out.

It’s About Engagement

The conventional wisdom about social media is that it’s a vehicle to reach the widest possible audience at the lowest cost — 467 first-level contacts connect you to 88,654 second-level contacts and 12,674,812 third-level contacts; Facebook has 600 million users, and so on. Getting dazzled by the numbers obscures the fact that success with social media requires engagement. And engagement means connecting with people who have shared passions and interests. Research on the effectiveness of tweets as a means to deliver a message shows that that happens most when tweets are re-tweeted — which only happens if the message resonated with the person reading it … an engaged follower. A “like” by a friend is more likely to be noticed than an ad, and even more if the friend commented on whatever it was they liked.

And engagement means that people are more likely to talk with their friends about the topic, whether it’s a product or a job, or interesting place to work. This is why talent communities can only succeed if they build engagement. The conventional wisdom about the talent communities is that they should include the largest number of possible candidates, with the idea that some will become employees. That approach doesn’t build engagement. It builds a database. The people in it are not likely to be retweeting your jobs or sharing them on Facebook.

The Gallup research shows that prospective customers are much more likely to try your product or service or advocate on your behalf if they hear good things about you from an engaged customer in their social network. They are much less likely to trust online advertising or corporate-sponsored Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. Candidates will behave the same way — if they’re engaged with you they will mention it to their friends, and those friends are more likely to be attracted to your jobs, more so than any amount of tweeting and self-promotion you may do through SEO for your jobs.

Old Habits Die Hard 

Much of recruiting has to do with advertising; the enduring popularity of job boards is testimony to that. Before that, so much of print advertising was devoted to help-wanted ads. It’s hard work to come up with leads on candidates and then reach out and try and to get them interested in your jobs. We’d all like to just post a job and wait for the resumes to roll in. When social media came along the most natural thing to do was to try and get those jobs in front of as many people as possible. That was the message peddled by ad agencies — the former middlemen in the job-posting business. Hence the obsession with click-through rates, impressions, views, etc. That may work for jobs where the requirements are a pulse and the lack of a felony (and sometimes only the first) but it usually doesn’t work for jobs requiring specialized skills. Do it too much and you’re just filling the channel with noise that no one’s paying any attention to.

Advertising doesn’t build engagement but a focused message, tailored to a narrow segment resonates. Talent communities are most effective when they include like-minded people who share a passion for their work. Do it right and you have passive candidates engage with you in ways not possible through advertising. Do it wrong and you’ve got the social media equivalent of spam.

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. 

Let me start with the basics of networking and the idea of developing a preliminary list of prospects. Most would agree that a pre-qualified referred candidate from a highly qualified co-worker is the standard of perfection. The reason: since they’re pre-qualified, you already know a bunch of important things about the person — e.g., how good they are, their compensation, if they’re looking or not, a rough idea of how they’d fit in your culture, and their team and leadership skills. That’s a lot of good information to know about someone before you even talk with them. And as a bonus, they’ll call you back if you mention the name of the co-worker.

Of course, you still need to engage with and recruit the person, but this is lot easier than having to call dozens of people, most of whom won’t call you back, and even if they do, you have no sense if they’re qualified and/or interested. This concept forms the foundation of the virtual talent community and future of passive candidate sourcing. Automating and scaling represent the hidden ingredients.

Now let’s consider technology as part of the proposed solution, particularly the concept of auto-ERP. This is one of the emerging bright spots in the world of sourcing and recruiting technology. The basic idea is that candidates can now directly connect with an employee they know at a company when they see a job posting of interest. LinkedIn includes this feature with its “Apply Now” button presenting a list of first-degree connections at the company. Jobvite offers this as part of its social recruiting services, and Jobs2Web provides it as part of its interactive sourcing programs.

But this is only half the solution, and the weaker half, at that. Let’s call this half outside-in auto-ERP, meaning candidates find your posting and then try to connect with your employees. In the long-term inside-out has more potential for passive candidate sourcing. In this case, the sourcing starts at the moment a job requisition is created. The inside-out auto-ERP system then searches through your company’s employees’ connections looking for great matches. The inside-out capability is what drives the virtual talent community and allows it to be scaled throughout the company.

PERP is the last piece of the puzzle. This stands for Proactive ERP (employee referral program). The problem with auto-ERP is that most of the existing connections, regardless of how fast you find them, aren’t going to yield as many top prospects as desired. The reason is that most of your employees haven’t made a point of building their networks with the idea of maintaining contact with the best people they’ve worked with in the past. While this might happen now and then, more likely their networks are composed of their good friends, people they know somewhat, a few subordinates, a potential future boss, and semi-casual current and former co-workers. This laissez-faire approach has limited value when it comes to turning these connections into outstanding employee referrals. While some will be there, most will not be. So when the auto-ERP engine starts doing its thing, it won’t find much.

PERP changes the game. The idea here is to set up internal company programs for employees to proactively connect with the best people they’ve worked with in the past, independent of their “friendship” status. Jobvite is doing this with a new for app for your employees to use for Facebook. LinkedIn is a little more direct since it’s designed to be a professional network of business associates. Regardless of the social media platform, PERP allows you to dramatically expand your employees’ network of top people.

Combining PERP, inside-out auto-ERP, and the concept of only calling pre-qualified referrals, represents the Virtual Talent Community, and in my mind the future of passive candidate sourcing and recruiting. Having a database of resumes, aka a “talent community,” is less advantageous than having a deep network of direct connections to the best people pre-qualified and referred to you by your own employees. With this type of virtual talent community in place, once a requisition is opened you’ll instantly see a pool of potential prospects emerge. Your employees will be automatically notified that one of their connections could be a good fit for the new career opportunity. They then can decide to contact the person directly, send an email, have a recruiter make the call, or suggest the match is not appropriate. As long as the posting represents a great career opportunity and the connection is a strong match, some type of contact will likely be established. (You might want to sign-up for a number of webcasts we’re hosting over the next weeks on how to implement these concepts.)

Of course, even with a virtual talent community, you still have to engage, screen, and recruit the prospects, but this is required anyway. However, we all know that when dealing with passive candidates, stronger recruiting and closing skills are required than when dealing with active candidates.

While all of this stuff is now being developed, you don’t have to wait to test out the virtual talent community concept for yourself. Here’s how. Search on some of your employees’ first-degree connections for a current search. If you have LinkedIn Recruiter you can do this automatically. You also might want to use LinkedIn to find co-workers you don’t now know who might be connected to the right type of person, and then connect with them. When you get a few good prospects, just call up the employee and ask what he or she thinks. Then connect with those people who are the best. You’ll discover they’ll all call you back, and since they’re pre-qualified, you just need to describe the career opportunity and get them interested. I refer to this as process as cherry-picking, and while what’s described here is manually intense, you quickly see how it could be automated and scaled throughout the organization.

The future of passive candidate sourcing and recruiting will accelerate with the development of the virtual talent community as described here. Of course, once everyone has the same tools and processes, they won’t help much from a talent acquisition standpoint since all your best employees will be connected with everyone else’s. The key then will be to make sure you’re providing your employees the best career opportunities. But until then, whoever has the first and deepest virtual talent community will have a field day.

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:

1. Don’t post job descriptions. These only work for those who have an economic need to apply. A great ad that leads with the EVP and emphasizes the impact of the actual work involved will increase your response rate at least 5X. There is no law, even the OFCCP’s, that says your postings have to be boring. Here’s an article for more on this important topic, but the key is to attract as many good people at the top of your sourcing funnel and then making sure you keep the best ones engaged from beginning to end.
2. Bridge the gap. The criteria top people initially use to engage with a recruiter is not the same as that used for deciding to accept an offer. Most people, especially if they’re fully employed, always ask about the compensation, the company, the job, and location when first contacted by a recruiter. These are very short-term tactical issues. When these same people decide to accept an offer, they consider different things, typically the growth opportunity; the impact the job can make; what they can learn, do, and become; the compensation and work-life balance issues; and the company and the mission. These are long-term and career strategy issues. Good recruiters know how to finesse the conversation to shift the discussion away from the short-term to the long-term in the first five minutes. As a result, they increase their opt-in rate on every call and contact. If you don’t know how to bridge this gap, you’re then forced to find more candidates. That’s why recruiters who can’t pull this off look for more new sourcing techniques to find more candidates rather than recruit the ones they already have.
3. Follow the 80/20 rule for passive candidate sourcing. Passive candidate sourcing is all about networking, not name generation. You need to get 1-2 pre-qualified referrals on every call to anyone on LinkedIn, then spend 80% of your time calling the best of these people. The payoff: they’ll call you back and they’ve been prequalified. That’s why bridging the gap is such a critical technique. Developing a relationship with a top person takes about 10 minutes, at least. If the person is not appropriate for the job then the process of networking can begin. As a minimum this consists of connecting with the person and then asking about their first-degree connections by cherry picking the best of them.
4. PERP your ERP. The new big thing in sourcing is auto-connecting your company’s open jobs with your employees’ LinkedIn and Facebook connections. LinkedIn, Jobvite, and Jobs2Web (among others) are now offering this important capability. This auto-connecting ability is getting smarter day by day and will represent a huge opportunity for those who know how to take advantage of this and target passive candidates. One way is to proactively seek out your employees’ best connections using the cherry picking mentioned above. This is the P in PERP: proactive. To turbo-charge your PERP and to lead the effort for reinventing the future, get your employees to connect with the best people they’ve worked with in the past. Then, sometime in the future, when you open a new requisition, the best people will be immediately identified through your employees’ LinkedIn network.
5. Minimize your opt-out ratio: aka, plug the leaks in your sourcing bucket. Top people don’t look for new jobs the same way average people do. They have different needs, they use different criteria for applying and accepting, and they move at a far different pace. Designing your sourcing processes around the needs of top active and passive candidates, rather than average candidates, will maximize the percent of top performers who ultimately apply. To get started on this, conduct a complete process review of your entire sourcing, interviewing, and hiring process. At each step, ask yourself if this is the best way to engage with a top-person who is not looking. After about an hour, you’ll have figured out the 4-5 things you need to do immediately to increase your end-to-end yield.
6. Defend your candidate from dumb decisions. If you do all of the above well, you’ll have 2-3X as many top candidates without having to do much else. Even better, you’ll have gotten out of the trap of “chasing the next silver sourcing bullet” mentally. However, if your hiring managers tend to overemphasize skills and/or aren’t very good at assessing candidate ability and/or aren’t very good at recruiting the best people to work for them, then you’ll need to coach them every step along the way. One way to do this is become a better interviewer than your hiring managers. You’ll never be able to out-yell a hiring manager, but you can out-fact them. Providing specific in-depth details about the candidate’s past performance can often override a biased or superficial assessment. If you do this often enough, find stronger candidates whom you’ve recruited and can close more top people without giving away the farm, you’ll soon be recognized as a true co-equal partner in the process.

Stop chasing the next sourcing silver bullet. Instead become a great recruiter, design your hiring processes around the needs of top people, offer careers instead of jobs, and partner with your hiring manager clients. As Steve Jobs would say if you asked him about recruiting:

Screw sourcing.

Maximize quality of hire.

Become a great recruiter.

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.

It’s about strategy, not tactics. Hiring top talent is not the same as filling positions with good people. Unknowingly, most companies employ a “candidate surplus” hiring model to fill their open positions, even the most critical ones. These means their hiring processes are designed around the idea of getting lots of people to apply, with the hope that a good person emerges. A talent scarcity model is totally different. In this case the hiring process is much more focused, designed around the concept that great talent is much more discriminating and a career opportunity discussion/decision dominates every step, from first contact to the final close. When viewed from a quality-of-hire perspective, LinkedIn’s advantages and options in the hands of a recruiter who actually recruits, rather than just screens, are far superior.

LinkedIn is a network, not a list of names. As mentioned in an earlier article, LinkedIn is not just a list of names to find and send emails. Instead it’s a 360° dynamic network of smart connections. Compare the flat list of Facebook to a clumsy hub-and-spoke distribution system (a one-to-many network) vs. instantly connecting everyone with everyone else by one degree of separation. This is almost equivalent to a point-to-point (everyone directly connected to everyone else). It’s this multi-level interconnectivity that allows a recruiter to Cherry Pick, PERP, and hopscotch (some advanced recruiter networking terms, see point 4) around his/her first degree connections and find a slate of pre-qualified candidates with a few phone calls and emails.

The short summary: a network is for networking, and real recruiters know how to network. On this basis LinkedIn is far ahead of its rivals.

Sourcing is not recruiting. If you have an excess of top talent to choose from who apply to your ads, you don’t need real recruiters. Microsoft was in this enviable position in the ’90s and Google claimed this space in  the ’00s. But selecting from a pool of top applicants is not recruiting; it’s screening and assessment.

Equally important, getting a list of names is sourcing, not recruiting, no matter how clever you are at Boolean searching. For example, there was a recent blog about how cool it was to be able to find primary school teachers in Ireland using state-of-the art Boolean terms. As a comparison test, I found pre-qualified candidates for the same job by calling up three headmasters at private schools in Ireland whom I found using LinkedIn’s seemingly prosaic advanced search tool. Even better, these candidates were all pre-qualified (I asked who the best primary school teachers they would want to hire again were) and they all called me back right away because I mentioned the headmaster’s name.

Navigation and the UI is critical. If you’re going to use a network for networking, LinkedIn has no peers. It was architected with this in mind. Real recruiters are as interested in finding hot prospects as they are in finding a person directly connected to a hot prospect. Getting referrals who have already been vetted and will call you back is the key to maximizing quality (see point 3 for an example), time to fill, and recruiter productivity (number of searches handled). You can accelerate this benefit by asking your employees to connect with the best people they’ve worked with at all of their prior companies. This is a PERP (proactive employee referral program). Then, when you have a search, search on their first-degree connections (LinkedIn easily allows you to do this). This is a high-yield effort. You can also Cherry Pick these connections by asking your employees (or any of your first-degree connections for that matter) about specific people in their first-degree connections. While you’re at it, using LinkedIn you can easily hopscotch around any profile you find by clicking the “Search for Similar People” button, the “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” feature, and even a person’s Recommendations. A multi-point network like LinkedIn allows you to do this stuff instantly. No other social media provides this type of interconnectivity.

Sourcing passive prospects and sourcing active candidates are not the same, nor should the choice of tools be. At the root of much of the LinkedIn vs. Google+ vs. Facebook vs. whatever debate is the fact that finding and recruiting people who are not looking requires a fundamentally different process than the one used for screening and selecting candidates who apply for your jobs. LinkedIn is great for real recruiters who are willing to pick up the phone and network. If you have plenty of great people to choose from or you’re willing to settle on the quality-of-hire metric, LinkedIn is probably not the best choice for you. On the other hand, if you’re a real recruiter you know it was designed with you in mind.

Long before I became a recruiter (I was an engineer working on inertial guidance systems), my first boss asked me to explain how these two concepts relate and why they were important to understand and apply: “Energy = Mass times the Speed of light squared and you can’t push on a rope.” I guess I was slow, since it took me a few years to figure it out. For a good engineer, knowing both is essential. The same principle can be applied to recruiting. If you think sourcing is recruiting, or that LinkedIn is not the primary platform for recruiting, you’re stuck on only half the solution to any complex problem.

(Hint: it relates to the adage – to a person with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.)

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:

• Establish a genuine relationship. Engaging in a dialogue with a passive candidate is an art, not a science. Be personal. Be engaging. Be brief. Before I even begin to craft an e-mail, I research the candidate through sites like LinkedIn to find out more about their professional experiences, educational background, hobbies, and philanthropic involvement. I try to find common ground and make the initial e-mail conversation all about them. For instance, if we have coworkers who went to the same university, belong to the same fraternity/sorority, or are involved in the same charitable organizations, I try to make these connections right away. While doing this, I focus on engaging them in the opportunity by the end of the very first sentence. Remember that your e-mail is just one among hundreds they receive each week.
• Use a “human-interest” approach in all dialogue — in-person or on the phone. Once live communication has been established — either by phone or through a face-to-face meeting — uncover the motivations, aspirations, and professional job skills of the passive candidate. Focus on asking open-ended ice breakers that will allow the candidate to reveal their true self. One candidate I pursued was an active volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. Through my conversation, I was able to learn that the individual loved the camaraderie of the volunteer groups and felt rewarded after seeing a family move into a finished home. The individual’s love of working in a team environment and drive to see challenging projects completed indicated that he might be a great addition to our field sales department — where teamwork and dedication are critical.
• Know the job. If you do not have a solid idea as to the specific responsibilities of the position, a passive candidate will pick up on it. In hiring for field sales positions, my colleagues and I have spent a considerable amount of time with the field sales team to find out what characteristics and skills are needed to be successful in this role. In addition, I have also participated in on-site visits with our field sales team members to find out what our customers are looking for in an account manager. Taking the time to experience a position firs-thand gives you a solid idea as to what is needed for success, while also giving you an opportunity to gauge the culture of the particular department.
• Love what you do. Passive candidates can spot a fake. You must constantly look for ways to become a passionate fan of your organization. Ensure that your talents and passions are aligned with your particular job responsibilities. In an ever-changing, highly-competitive profession, you cannot afford to become stagnant.

Over time, I have found that sharing experiences from my 13-plus years at CDW is a very effective way to convey my passion for the organization. People tend to remember the personal stories they hear. Sharing one’s experiences also helps to establish a high level of trust with a passive candidate. A recruiter’s ability to convey enthusiasm and establish trust is paramount.

Remember, there is a good chance that your next game-changing hire won’t be found in the pile of resumes on your desk or in your e-mail inbox. By committing to a strategy and executing on these tactics, your organization can be well on its way to developing a tremendous competitive advantage and establishing a great environment in which to work.

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.

These generally cover factors like job title, company, location, and compensation. However, when candidates actually accept an offer, or even seriously consider one, the factors used to make this assessment are not the same. In this case they focus on job content, growth opportunity, chance to make an impact, the hiring manager’s leadership qualities, the team, and of course, compensation. But even in this case, compensation is somewhere in the middle of the list, rather than at the top. There is where “Control” comes into play and why it’s so important that the recruiter understand it thoroughly (article).

Control allows the recruiter to bridge the gap between the criteria the candidate uses to first engage in a conversation and those used to make a career decision after having a full set of information. It requires a combination of appropriate questioning, the ability to smoothly address concerns, and the ability to instantly shift the conversation from short-term to long-term. This is an essential skill if you want to increase the number of strong prospects in your candidate pool. If you want to either recruit passive candidates or network with them, you must start with a thorough understanding of the 6Cs, but be a master at Control.

Why Closing the Deal Is in the Top 3 of the 6Cs

One could argue that closing is more important than control, and should be the #1 of the 6Cs (article). Consider that if you can’t close the deal, everything else you do is a waste of time, effort, and resources. Let me be perfectly clear on this point. Closing encompasses the actual negotiation with the candidate, getting the person to accept the offer on reasonable terms, and making sure the person considers your offer on all critical short- and long-issues. Making matters more challenging is the idea that the person was not looking for a new opportunity until you called. Under this scenario that person will likely get a counteroffer that’s more competitive than what you’re offering, or worse, the person will immediately start looking and find something else better. Under this scenario, the ability to hold the deal together and close effectively takes center stage.

The fact that only 3% of those taking the poll considered this ability most important dumbfounds me.

Why Connecting Deserves to Be in the Top Three of the 6Cs

Most of you know I do a great deal of work training corporate recruiters to optimize their use of LinkedIn’s talent suite of products through networking (article). What surprises me is that corporate recruiters still think of LinkedIn as a flat list of 120 million names of largely passive candidates. For an external recruiter, it’s a 360° interconnected 3D map of every single person in the U.S. (soon the world). The idea here is that rather than finding your ideal candidate directly, consider instead contacting someone who might know the best candidate, and then provide a referral. For example, I called partners in CPA firms to identify great controllers they’ve worked with in the past. I connected with buyers at major retail chains to find out who the best salespeople they know are. And I’ve contacted product managers to find great engineers they’ve worked with on launching new products. Getting a referral like this is even better, since these people they call you back right away. And even better than that, these people are all fully qualified, since this is how you initially got their name.

So stop calling people you don’t know as a primary means for finding passive candidates. Instead start networking with everyone you do know and have them give you two or three names of the best people who are directly connected to them. If you start doing this on every call, pretty soon you’ll realize that connecting is really how you source passive candidates. (We’re holding a series of webcasts in the next few weeks demonstrating how to take connecting to another level and why you should give your TPRs a hug, rather than banish them.)

The 6Cs are the quintessential skills for any third-party recruiter who expects to survive and thrive in the current economic environment. Corporate recruiters need to think and act like TPRs if they expect to have success finding, recruiting, and hiring passive candidates in any significant quantity. While corporate recruiters might have the ability to deal with passive candidates, I’m not sure they have the hunger for it.

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: Influencers, Advocates, and Enthusiasts.

Influencers are those users who create content on the brand’s behalf and post to the brand’s social media page. These fans are the rarest in terms of activity of your fan base. To gauge their rarity, look at your own page and see what percentage of people are posting content, asking questions, etc. It is likely less than 2% of your fans.

Advocates are those followers or fans who frequently comment and/or like the content that a brand creates. These fans are more common than influencers. Because the same individuals in this group are repeatedly liking and commenting on content, this group may feel like a larger community; however, these fans are probably less than 10% of the overall audience.

Enthusiasts make up 80% or more of your fans. These are your lurkers. They are people who occasionally check in on a brand’s content. Many times, however, these fans are not seeing the brand’s content in their feed because they are inactive with the brand. And, unfortunately, these are the most passive candidates and are often the most easily disengaged.

In the Facebook fan paradigm, a brand has one message to all these different audiences. Essentially, Facebook is one-size-fits-all communications. And in this age of content is king, herein lays the cavernous difference and potential game-changing difference between Facebook and Google+. In Google+, a brand can share content that is deeply more relevant to each of these audiences. And that is the power of Google+ Circles.

In Recruiting Circles

In the language of social recruiting, these audiences could easily be: Eager, Active, and Passive. On your Careers’ Facebook page, you probably have those eager candidates who are regularly inquiring about the status of their application, active candidates who spend their time on your page liking or commenting on your posts in an effort to be noticed, and the vast majority of the fans of your careers’ page who are passively lurking to learn more about the company, roles, and teammates.

With Google+, you could communicate differently to each of these audiences. You could push more aggressive marketing content to those passive candidates in an effort to drive their application. More candidate education content could be tailored and delivered to your eager and active candidates. And because within Google+ you can create circles within circles, you can segment each of these audiences further into sub-circle,s for example: High Potential, New Grad, or role-specific circles like Accounting, Tech, or Marketing. In theory, you could push geo-targeted, role-specific content to only high-potential passive candidates. It brings content relevancy to social channels where it belongs. It is truly one-size-fits-you.

The chief complaint with Google+ Circles is that they could easily become too cumbersome over time. This is a valid complaint. Complex circles could become a real maintenance challenge, as would the creation of relevant content. However, with any new technology or communications strategy, the ideal entrance into the game is keeping it simple. As time and experimentation with the new tool goes further, the segmentation and communication can become more advanced.

Because not all fans are the same and have different needs from a brand, be thoughtful in how circles are created and maintained. If you are considering implementing Google+ as part of your social media plan, think about how your fans interact with you in the context of some of the business challenges. Are you inundated with resumes? Are people unaware of what is unique about your workplace? How do you sell to those elusive passive candidates? With an eye to your challenges and how your audience wants to interact, create a simple circle strategy that is scalable. And as a new fan interacts with your brand’s Google+ account, be committed to vigilant circle maintenance.

It will be interesting to see how Google+ will impact social recruiting and how brands and employers apply segmentation to the social conversation. But the ability to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time is as powerful as it gets.

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.

Collectively they represent reasons why you must tame your hiring managers as part of any search assignment — at least if you want to fill the position with some top-notch in a reasonable period of time. Here are some basic rules for taming your hiring managers. (More)

Basic Rules for Taming Hiring Managers

1. Make sure the manager understands real job needs. Ask the hiring manager what the person must accomplish over the course of the first year that would indicate why the person is a top performer. I refer to this list of performance objectives as performance profiles. The idea behind this: if the person can demonstrate they’ve done comparable work, they obviously have the requisite skills.
2. Make sure the hiring manager “owns” the employee value proposition. Before you start hunting, make sure you ask the hiring manager why a top person with a lot of upside potential would want your job. Forget the apple pie and motherhood. This EVP must be specific and related to the actual job. As you’ll see below, this forms the core of the candidate’s intrinsic motivator for looking.
3. Insist that the hiring manager be open to talking with candidates on an exploratory basis. The best people are looking for career moves, not lateral transfers. Passive candidates aren’t even looking. By giving these prospects a chance to talk with a hiring manager on a peer-to-peer level to see if your opening represents a possible career move, you’ll add a lot of strong candidates into the top of your funnel.

Of course there are more taming rules aside from these, but this is a good start. As you’ll discover though, they’re not enough. In this case — especially if you want to find and hire the best passive candidates — the 6 Cs come into play. Here’s a quick take on what they are and why they’re critical.

The Key Tipping Points for Recruiting Passive Candidates — a.k.a. “The 6Cs”

1. Compelling: you must be able to capture the candidate’s intrinsic motivator in your job posting, voice mail, or email. It’s what will get your hot prospect to pay attention to the message. For a staff engineer it might be pushing the envelope on a new technology. For an executive it might be a chance to turn around a troubled business. For a flight nurse it’s probably something related to the daily rush involved in helping save someone’s life.
2. Control: make sure your opening questions requires the prospect to tell you about him or herself before you tell the person about the job. The things that a candidate asks about when first contacted by a recruiter (pay, title, company, location) are not the same when deciding which offer to take (opportunity, growth, challenge). Control allows the recruiter to position the conversation at the beginning to ensure that the best prospects don’t opt out for the wrong reasons.
3. Career: during your first call you must be able to convert your open position into a career opportunity on the fly. If the candidate describes her job in some detail first (see point two above), the recruiter will have the opportunity to determine if your current opening offers the candidate a true career move. Part of this could be adjusting the scope of the job up or down to better meet the candidate’s career needs.
4. Connect: Even if your prospect isn’t perfect, he or she is probably only one degree of separation from someone who is. Once you decide the person isn’t ideal, start networking. One way is to connect on LinkedIn and start looking at the person’s connections and ask about specific people. Get their qualifications and then start calling.
5. Conviction: Persistence is key. You must understand your job opening, and why it offers a career opportunity — and you must not take “no” for an answer. If you’re not convinced of what you have to offer is great, neither will your candidate.
6. Close: You’ll never have enough money in the budget to pay the best prospects what they want. You can minimize the blow here by selling and closing on the career opportunity your position offers, not the compensation it pays. If you miss this critical “C” the others won’t matter.

Whether the candidate is passive or not, if you want to hire top-notch talent you’ll need to employ the 6Cs on every assignment. They’re all critical tipping points in your hunt for the best people around. The biggest tipping point of them all though, is to make sure you’ve tamed your hiring manager client. Without this person onboard and committed to hire the best, all of your good efforts will have little payoff.

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!

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.

1. Offer compelling career opportunities, not lateral transfers. If you want to hire top-notch passive candidates at scale, you need to foster a culture of performance and opportunity that’s obvious and relevant. This means people are going to be challenged and pushed, and if successful, provided opportunities to take on bigger roles. This theme needs to be carried into the hiring process at every step, from how job descriptions are written, how the career site is designed, how the application processes is implemented, and how candidates are interviewed, assessed, and offered positions. Expecting to hire the best people, treating them like a commodity, and expecting them to be grateful is not how you build a dynamic and motivated workforce, even if they are grateful.
2. Go fast, slowly. Go slow enough to ensure the candidate has enough information to make a strategic decision in comparison to other opportunities being considered. As part of this, go fast enough to ensure you don’t lose the person for lack of attention. Fully-employed passive candidates need time to evaluate your opening as a true career move. Leaving a good situation is not an easy decision to make. Going just slow enough ensures the candidate has the opportunity to collect all of the needed information to make the best personal decision.
3. Treat the person as a consultant, not a vendor. Why not start the interview process by assuming the person is competent, rather than assuming the person isn’t? This reframing changes the whole tenor of the subsequent interview process. If you treat the person as a knowledgeable consultant and expert in his or her field, the conversation is more open, more honest, more relevant, and more accurate. This doesn’t mean you let the person off the hook. It just means the conversation will be among equals. Passive candidates demand this respect. Active candidates deserve it.
4. Use the one-question interview to describe the job and determine job fit. Stop the 20-minute introductory sales pitch. Instead, cut this down to a two-minute overview of the job. During the interview describe a critical performance objective and ask the candidate to describe his or her most comparable accomplishment. If you do the same for all of the remaining performance objectives, by the end of the interview you’ll know if the person is a great fit for the job, whether active or passive. The candidate will also know if the job offers a career move, or not. (More info on the one-question interview.)
5. Use the interview to recruit the person. There is more to the interview than assessing competency and motivation. As you conduct the one-question interview as described above, look for areas where the candidate is a bit light (i.e., span of control, impact, job complexity, skills, etc.). If you find 4-5 factors like this and the gap isn’t too wide, you can then position your job as means for the candidate to quickly grow and develop in these areas. Collectively, these gaps represent a career move. In this way, you’ve “customized” the career move idea for the candidate by using the interview to uncover these factors. This is much better than over-selling or using generic boilerplate and hyperbole.
6. During the interview describe an “if…then” future if the person is hired and successful. The quality of the career growth opportunity is the primary reason a top-notch person will accept one offer over the other. The best way to set the stage for this is for the hiring manager to mention to the candidate that if the person is successful in the role there are a number of future possibilities available. Then the manager should go on to describe these. Combining this “if…then” future in combination with the career gap idea above is a great way for the candidate to see your opening as one offering a compelling move.
7. Formalize the candidate decision-making process. Most active candidates accept offers for the wrong reasons, primarily to get back on the payroll. While companies think they have the upper hand here, it’s short-lived once the person starts. To improve on-the-job performance, employee satisfaction, and retention, don’t let your candidates (active or passive) accept your offers without evaluating them from a career perspective. These means they should evaluate your job opening from a short- and long-term perspective considering the type of work, the opportunities for growth, and the compensation package. (Email us if you’d like a sample copy of the form we use in our training listing the factors top passive candidates use when comparing opportunities.) If you make every candidate go through the same process, don’t be surprised if all of your new hires start performing at peak levels from Day 1.
8. Measure Quality of Hire pre- and post-hire. Quality should not be determined by how active or passive the candidate is in their job-search process. We use a 10-factor scorecard as part of our performance-based interviewing process to measure pre-hire quality in an objective way. This goes a long way in leveling the playing field between passive and active candidates. Since passive candidates are more difficult to recruit, it then makes sense to focus on active candidates if QoH is comparable.

The key idea behind all of this is to treat everyone as if they’re top-notch, whether they’re active or passive. Job hunting status should not be part of the quality of hire assessment. In the process, you’ll not only see and hire more talented people, you’ll also make everyone who has been through your assessment process feel they’ve been assessed professionally and treated fairly. We all treat our customers with respect, All candidates should be offered the same courtesy.