Recruiter News  >  Finding, Categorizing, and Hiring Selective Candidates - April 2006

In Part One of the Series, we discussed the problems with labeling candidates as “Active” or “Passive”. The myth of the Passive Candidate needs to be confronted and transformed into a strategy of identifying and then hiring quality candidates who are “Selective” in their job search as opposed to candidates that are “Indiscriminate” in their job search.

The advantages in this strategy are clear from the definitions.

Selective Candidates:

• Put forth their own effort to identify quality companies and quality hiring teams.
• Want the right job, the right fit, the right culture
• Manage their career wisely, rarely evidencing a pattern of job-hopping for minor reasons.
• Have probably turned down job offers in the past.
• Answer questions about negative events on their resumes truthfully and without apology (that’s when they learned the most).
• Find new positions mainly through personal referrals.
• Rarely send resumes blindly to companies or recruiters (they never hit the Apply Now button on a job board)
• Consider the challenges of the job as important as the salary.
• Insist on clear job descriptions and written job offers.
• Help facilitate extensive interviews where meeting everyone they will be working with is a priority.

• Take little initiative in the interview process.
• Post their resumes everywhere they can.
• Are often represented by multiple recruiters.
• Are rarely prepared for an interview, often not knowing what the job entails or what the company does.
• Take half days where they pretended to be sick for a first interview because the HR generalist only works from 8-5.
• Often can be negotiated for lower salaries (and then use the first day hired to look for a new job on Monster).
• Leave positions for a slightly better offer, never calculating benefits packages, travel times, or type of work offered.
• Give bland answers to all interview questions. They try to get through the interview without making a mistake, instead of using the interview to find out who they are working for.
• Will take a job without meeting their immediate supervisor.
• Are terrified of questions that focus on their value to an employer.

Note: If you want to make nice and not offend prospects, you can still refer to indiscriminate candidates as “active”, but passive has to be changed to “selective.”

When recruiters talk about passive and active candidates, we’re really talking about average employees and great employees. Great employees show the same professionalism and care with their job search that they use with their jobs. Average employees are more interested in doing the absolute minimum to get hired and then not get fired. So if that’s what we mean, maybe the first step towards sanity in the hiring process is using labels and strategies that help us hire great employees.

Strategies to Approach Selective Candidates
The key to Selective candidates is finding where they spend time and making the effort to contact them. In a digital world, this can mean online as well as in the more traditional avenues like user groups, conferences, and of course, names sourcing. Here are your best bets to start the hunt for great employees.

Education: Companies can and should be using the media, blogs and newsletters to educate all candidates on best practices for employment processes. Rather than focusing on how to make a recruiter’s job easier, companies can provide valuable information on hiring processes that yield the best candidates. Specific information on a hiring process has to be carefuly vetted before being released, but general information on how to get hired at any company should be part of an education campaign in the local media. The more candidates know, the better they will become at avoiding typical mistakes. Recruiters should be writing articles, blogs, and working with colleges to increase the pool of selective candidates.

Social Networking Sites: LinkedIn. ZoomInfo. Jigsaw. MySpace. All of these sites use self-referential material from users to create giant communities of interest accessible by search engines. Selective Candidates will often put their information into a social networking site as a way of “rewarding” savvy recruiters who put forth the effort to understand new technologies. In many ways, using a social networking site is like being on the list at an exclusive club. Connecting through the site is your neon hand stamp.

Referral Services: Companies like Jobster, karmaOne and Job Thread set up referral systems where your positions are forwarded only to select audiences. Similar to the dynamics behind a social networking site, referral programs target smaller audiences who enjoy being in on the latest hiring secret.

Building Communities of Interest: Staffing firms often sponsor user groups in specific softwares to put their name in front of professionals eager to improve their skills. Companies in a specific niche or with regular demands now have the ability to create websites, newsletters, and blogs that bring important information to their talent communities. In essence, supporting a community of interest brings publicity to your company and lets the talent pool know you are interested in their progression. That’s goodwill any recruiter would gladly pay for.

Using Online Tools of Early Adopters: Video, podcasts, contests, blogs, comments, RSS feeds, publicity stunts and a thousand other ideas from your current employees will brand your company as unique and exciting. Thousands of small companies, many in your local areas, are looking for their big break, and some of them are even great ideas that can help you hire more of the people you are looking for. Being on the lookout for technologies early adopters use is good for your recruiting strategies because selective candidates are often early adopters. The more you reach out to early adopters, the more likely they are to respond with referrals, better ideas, and even, dare we say, acceptance of an interview and an offer?

The Strategy Meets the Real World
The elephant in the room for all of our plans is the reality of resume saturation. Every recruiter I know has a database with tens (if not hundreds) of thousand of resumes, and at least a hundred more arriving daily. A basic fact of the recruiting world is that in good employment markets and bad employment markets, a recruiter can fill their jobs with the ranks of the indiscriminate. And filling positions is what recruiters are paid to do. Managers have the ultimate responsibility to train employees, so an internal recruiter quickly realizes that finding candidates that pass the minimum requirements is better for long-term survival than chasing after selective candidates that may take years to hire, if you can hire them at all.

So what do you do? You compromise.

At the beginning of the first article, we talked about the Pareto Principle, often referred to as the 80/20 rule. Misused, and maltreated, the 80/20 rule is a salve to lots of bad decisions. I suggest a new beginning, one where we take the 80/20 rule, change it to the 80:20 rule, and turn it into a successful plan for recruiting.

The New 80:20 Rule
80% of a recruiter’s time is spent sorting, filtering, and responding to indiscriminate candidates. 20% of a recruiter’s time is spent contacting, identifying, and recruiting selective candidate pools.

Recruiters work with indiscriminate candidates because they are often good enough to get hired, and trying to fill any company with only A-listers is actually a poor staffing strategy. Some jobs just don’t require the best and the brightest, but they do need to be filled. At the same time, getting to the end of your resume pile is like trying to get to the end of the Internet. You can never be finished.

So to improve your efficiency, set specific times where you stop sorting through the resume flood and focus on building that talent pipeline of Selective candidates. Using even 5 or 10 percent of your daily workflow to connect with great candidates will do wonders for your recruiting successes and your daily energy. Selective candidates are great to work with, because they make you feel valued. Working with great employees is a pleasure, and over time, you’ll find that building a reputation among selective employees is a boost to your active recruiting efforts as well.

Summary
The myth of the passive candidate is dangerous because it is almost true. The pressure to compete in a talent war leads recruiters to fall back on labels to fend off executive oversight, but words have meanings, and the use of the words passive/active all too often reverts to employed/unemployed when explaining these labels to the top brass. To exacerbate the problem, the passive label encourages candidates to play hard-to-get in hopes of securing higher response rates and a better bargaining position when the offer letter comes.

The use of Selective Candidates as a label has two main advantages. The Selective label is a positive one that accurately describes what recruiters are looking for in candidates. We’re looking for candidates who approach their job search in the same professional manner they approach their jobs. The Selective label also represents a goal that candidates can strive for, one they would be proud to carry. A Selective candidate doesn’t need to play games because they know their worth.

As far as recruiting strategies go, that’s the kind of honesty that can only lead to improved hiring results.

About the Author

Jim Durbin is an online media consultant for the Durbin Media Group in St. Louis, MO. He joined the recruiting world in 1999 at the peak of the internet bubble in Los Angeles, and has since made the transition from recruiting blogging to blogging consultant.

Mr. Durbin is interested in using the blogging format to provide the common man a chance to speak out in a world where personal publishing online makes every man or woman equal to the world's largest public relations company. He is the primary author for StlRecruiting.com, and a contributing author for the Recruiting.com group blog.