When recruiters ask managers to describe their “perfect candidate” to recruit they usually describe them something like this:
In short, the perfect candidate is a successful person that is very good at their job and who is currently employed. They are also likely to be well paid and content (happy) in their job. I call these candidates “Content/Employed Performers” (CEP’s). They are sometimes also referred to as “passive” job seekers. The recruiter’s paradox When you look at the strategies that recruiters use to find their “perfect” person you usually learn that the typical recruiter’s strategy attracts the exact opposite of what managers really want. Instead of attracting “employed performers” they are actually attracting “unemployed / malcontents” (UM’s). I call that the recruiters paradox. Unemployed / malcontents are the easiest people to recruit but they are the exact opposite of what managers want! A typical web site or newspaper ad only attracts candidates that are “actively” searching for a job. These active searchers are often “unemployed” or “employed but they are malcontents” (those that can’t influence their managers enough to make their current jobs worth staying at)! Unemployed people are easy to find (in fact they will often find you) but they are not the kind of people you really want to recruit. You want successful people that are currently employed because people that are in high demand are almost always employed. Where have all the flowers gone? These days it is not uncommon for recruiters to complain about the “shortage” of good workers. There in fact is no real shortage of good workers. The number of superior candidates hasn’t changed at all (Where did they all go? They didn’t all die did they?). Certainly there is the appearance of a shortage but there is a simple explanation for it. During times of high unemployment, some of the content / employed performers that would normally be employed are excessed (laid-off) into the active job seeker pool. When a significant percentage of the “performers” are unemployed (and thus active job seekers) a standard web site will now attract some “good” candidates. However when boom times come nearly all of the good performers get hired again and they revert back to being “passive job seekers” again. When only poor performers respond to ads or web sites you get the “appearance of a shortage”. But all that has really changed is that there are now no top performers that will respond to recruiting tools designed for the active job seeker. The traditional recruiting tools no longer work because they were never designed to attract the passive employed person! Stop taking the easy road Surprisingly, the people that managers really want (employed top performers) are also relatively easy to find (but hard to recruit). They are highly successful performers employed at major benchmark firms. Everyone who is any good in their field knows their names. The primary problem with these Content / Employed Performers is that they are not likely to be looking for a job and they are hard to shift into the job seeking mode. Typically the very best content / employed performers are hard to recruit because:
It’s easy to see why recruiters focus on the “active” job seeker. They are easy to recruit and the “fill the requisitions” mentality as well as the reward structure of most firms push recruiters to take the easy road. Putting “butts in chairs” is certainly easier than hiring “Michael Jordan types”. However if you believe, as I do, that “championships are won with seasoned top performers” then you must consider shifting your recruiting approach toward the harder to recruit content / employed performer. How do you attract the content / employed person? Finding content / employed performers and convincing them to become active job seekers requires a three part strategy of
More on how to do that will be in next Friday’s continuation of this series.
