Active Doesn’t Always Mean the Best

Friday, January 17, 2020

In this first installment of our new blog series, the AntonGM Team talks about the need to integrate a Passive Talent Strategy into your recruitment process.

When many people think about recruitment, they tend to only think about the end result—the placement. Rather than being a metric, a placement is an outcome of the recruitment process. By simply counting hires, we fail to consider the rest of the process that brought that candidate into the role.

According to an article published by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), corporate attitudes may finally be shifting away from that traditional “bum in the seat” metric when it comes to measuring the success of recruitment strategies.

That’s the good news.

But then what are we measuring, and how do we get there? One of the often-overlooked elements in an effective recruitment process is a structured approach to engaging with passive candidates.

In reality, top industry talent is typically not applying to your job board. In most cases, “ideal” candidates with the right mix of skills and alignment with your company’s culture and goals are already gainfully employed.

If you think that passive candidates like these are the minority, consider this statistic: seventy percent of the global workforce are considered passive candidates.

So, by not targeting these individuals, it significantly narrows one’s overall talent pipeline. This means that many potential candidates would be overlooked during the recruitment process, including those "right fit," passive candidates.

Even though this strategy is part of the playbook for many recruitment professionals, it remains a challenge to justify the time and effort spent on cultivating a talent pipeline of passive candidates to clients.

Why is this the case?

The answer is simple.

Passive recruitment strategies are a lot of work and require a dedicated, consistent process to identify those candidates who are not active but who may be open to a career leveraging opportunity.

While a more aggressive focus on active candidates might fill your open positions faster, it doesn’t necessarily fill them with the right people for the job. When it comes to candidates, it is best to remember that active doesn’t always mean the best.