This article is part of my continuing series on passive candidate recruiting. The key principle underlying all of these articles is that you can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow, nor the same recruiters, used for active candidates. According to a recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn, 83% of fully-employed members on LinkedIn consider themselves passive when it comes... (more...)

A recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn clearly indicated the 83% of their fully employed members classified themselves as passive candidates. It seems to me that if you’re not an expert at recruiting this 83%, you’re missing the 800-pound gorilla. To help here, I’m in the process of consolidating and summarizing all of the articles, webcasts, and recordings I’ve prepared in the past few... (more...)

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

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

You can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow nor the same recruiters used for active candidates. We conducted an in-depth survey with LinkedIn last year that indicated that 82% of their fully-employed members were unlikely to even consider switching jobs unless directly contacted by a recruiter or through an employee they’ve worked with closely in the past. This increased... (more...)

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog I came across this quote attributed to Steve Jobs (this has been paraphrased for the ERE audience): Screw the channel. Manage the present for optimum performance. Reinvent the future. The equivalent for recruiting goes something like this: Screw sourcing. Maximize quality of hire. Become a great recruiter. The point: hiring great talent is not about great sourcing;... (more...)

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

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

I’m just a recruiter, not some Ph.D., OD guru, or stat-type, but over the years I’ve developed a theory about interviewing that seems to work 84.27% of time. Using it for the past 25 years, more than 84.27% percent of my candidates have been called back for second round interviews. Ninety percent of these pass whatever “questionnaire” is thrown at them ranging from the Gallup intense and expensive... (more...)

In a recent ERE article I made the contention that if you wanted to convert a corporate recruiting department into a competitive internal executive search group, you had to first develop the hiring process recruiters would use, before you hired the recruiters. This is primarily attributed to the fact that the external executive search business model and most of the processes they use are fundamentally... (more...)