How to find Passive Candidates from Active Candidate Boards
Mark Berger is a colleague with quite a few tricks up his sleeves. He has graciously agreed to be a recurring blogger on my site. I think he has a lot of good things to say and I am anxious to read more of his tips. If you would, please give a warm welcome to Mark Berger and his new series - “Berger Bites.” Yay!
Berger Bites
I know many of you are using the major resume boards for candidates. Although I believe there is still a place for the “active candidate” boards in the sourcing methodology of almost any recruiting organization, most recruiters that I speak with do admit it is not paying off these days as much as it once was. Many of the more progressive organizations are resorting to obtaining passive candidate for their open assignments.
Normally, one would not think of getting “passive candidates” from these services. We go there because the candidates are seeking employment, and it is an easy way to get what we are looking for. Since we are all paying the exorbitant fees the services charge we might as well get as much out of them as we can. Here is one way to extract passive candidates from these services. Use the keyword “references”. Although they probably shouldn’t, many candidates list references down at the bottom of their resume. Often these are managers or co-workers having the same basic skill set of the active candidate on display. To find passive candidates with Java skills simply type into the search box:
You will get resumes of active candidates with java on the resume but you will also get those resumes that have a list of references at the bottom of the document. At your office simply substitute the keyword java with the keyword(s) of your choice. You could even add the geographic restrictors that are required. Call these people to pitch your opportunity. This is not foolproof as many candidates also have the phrase “references on request” or something similar. Also, some may be personal or otherwise unqualified references, however, this should not deter you from at least giving this a try.
I would love to see comments from anyone trying this technique along with their success or lack thereof.
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Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR has been recruiting since before most of you were born. He has been involved in Internet recruiting and sourcing since its infancy in the early nineties starting with classified ads on AOL and Compuserve. Many resources on recruitment technology, including those for Internet passive candidate sourcing and recruiter databases can be found by visiting his website at www.swatrecruiting.com.
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Comments
Mark, if the “references on/upon request” thing is a problem, why not just change the string thus?
java references -”upon request” -”on request”
–Glenn
Welcome Mark to the Lounge, what I believe n call Jim’s world.. I did try these a lot while recruiting sr. manager in bulk for a top fast food chain in Uk, lot resumes had it on them info on them…
@ Glenn - nice suggestions.
I’ve been doing this for quite a while and it works VERY well! I believe we can all get so much more creative and resourceful in our search strings whether it’s on Google or a job board.
Great post!!! I actually came across a great passive canidate while using the search term “sales manager”. The canidate was listed as a reference