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Recruitment & Retention

Published July 2008

Passive Candidate Recruiting: Evolving With a Changing Workforce

 

  Rebecca Callahan

Large-scale baby-boomer retirements, more specialized jobs and significant shortfalls in technology and other fields all have contributed to a new focus on creative hiring strategies.

As the employment landscape evolves, companies are facing new challenges with talent acquisition. The recruitment of passive candidates, those who are successfully employed and not seeking new jobs, has become a critical component of the recruitment process. By instituting a passive candidate program, organizations can build large pipelines of qualified candidates, especially for hard-to-fill positions.

The rise of passive recruiting dovetails with recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), another emerging trend in HR. In RPO, companies engage with a specialized provider to perform all (enterprise RPO) or a subset (selective RPO) of their hiring functions. RPO also can be used on a project basis.

Talent acquisition has become more complex, time-consuming and costly. In addition to the candidate supply-and-demand issues, many companies also experience dramatic fluctuations in hiring needs. By partnering with an RPO provider, companies can leverage passive recruitment best practices, as well as utilize recruiters focused on this hiring strategy.

At the same time, HR executives and hiring managers have taken on more strategic roles, leaving less time for transactional and administrative functions. RPO providers can offer a blend of transactional recruiting for high-volume positions, but also can partner with hiring groups to develop a passive candidate recruitment strategy that is more relationship-oriented, as opposed to transactional recruiting.

RPO offers a number of benefits to companies grappling with these issues, including a larger, more diverse talent pool, shorter hiring cycles, higher-quality candidates and lower costs. It also can be scaled up or down as a company's needs change. Many candidates say RPO also offers a more streamlined, informed and pleasant experience.

By investing in a passive recruitment strategy, recruiters build relationships with candidates, not just discussing one opportunity with a candidate, but selling him or her a career with the company. The ability to continuously keep candidates warm and informed of the company's ongoing developments makes them more likely to make changes in positions.

Each engagement should be designed to meet the client's unique needs. Enterprise and selective RPO engagements typically are long-term and include sourcing, screening, interview scheduling, administration, pre-employment verification and reporting. Success metrics such as candidate quality, hiring-manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction, time to fill and ethnic/gender diversity typically are included in the contract.

RPO is particularly valuable in filling jobs in which demand exceeds supply and specialized skills and experience are required because RPO providers continuously are researching the marketplace, working to understand which factors prompt candidates to make changes. Recruiters use the places where candidates work and play as primary sourcing avenues to find passive candidates.