You can't shake a stick in the recruitment world without unceremoniously shattering it over the concept of passive candidates. The true target of head hunting. The professionals so skilled they never look for jobs, but rather jobs look for them. The perpetually employed, over-performing A player.
It's not totally unreasonable. After all, passive candidates make up 75% of the talent market, (according to LinkedIn's 2015 Global Recruiting Trends Report) and of course the bulk of the market should get the bulk of your attention. The real issue is when recruiters assume that active candidates inherently aren't as good as passive candidates. There are many reasons why strong candidates may be on the hunt for a new job and not merely "open to new opportunities", and if you're disregarding this 25% of all candidates, you're missing out on some great hires.
This came up on a recent episode of our podcast, where our Recruiter Evangelist Loni discussed the issue when sitting on a recruitment panel:
As Loni points out, one example of valuable active candidates comes in the form of massive branch closings. Also, in the event of acquisitions, often sales teams are completely gutted by the acquiring party. M&As are a great opportunity to find people who are in the talent market through no fault of their own.
In some cases, the issue isn't with the recruiter but with a hiring manager who might have a predilection against active candidates. Here, it's up to the recruiter to explain why the candidate is active and stress what makes them a strong contender regardless of happenstance.
Lastly, it's safe to assume that most people have at one point been an active candidate. I'm sure at that point in your career, you still considered yourself a strong applicant. When you're tasked with finding the people who are going to make your company great, you simply can't afford to shrug off 1/4 of the talent market.
