The 7 Secrets of World-Class Recruiting Organizations (Part 1 of 7): Be “Passive Aggressive”

October 25, 2012 at 4:15 AM by Jon Bischke

This is the first post in a seven-part series entitled "The 7 Secrets of World-Class Recruiting Organizations". Over the last 18 months since we founded Entelo, we've had the pleasure of spending some time with some of the world's best recruiting teams. While we can't share everything we've learned, there are some general best practices that we are allowed to pass on. We hope you enjoy this series of posts!

So without further delay, here is the first of seven things that we’ve seen “Talent War winners” do:

#1 - Aggressively seek out passive candidates. We refer to this as being "passive aggressive" (wink wink nod nod). The best recruiting organizations that we’ve talked to are not content to sit back and wait for quality people to find them. They participate in something that we like to call “Proactive Recruiting”. It’s the heat- seeking missile approach to recruiting.

How do they kick this process off? Here are a few things we’ve seen:

  • They do whatever they can to determine where the people they are looking to hire are likely to be. Often this is knowing what company a person might have worked for previously or what school they attended. It might be diving deep on a specific Github project that has a lot of correlation with what their company is building or doing a deep dive into academic publications (as an aside, we’ve seen more people using Academia.edu and ResearchGate as recruiting tools lately). Whatever it is, it’s done with a level of intensity that is second-to-none. They are determined to leave no stone unturned in their search for the best people to fill a position.
  • They have a systematic “hit list”. Way more sophisticated than the “spray and pray” approach that other organizations use. They realize that the universe of the “right” candidates is actually somewhat narrow so they take the time to research those individuals and reach out using highly customized messages. To hear them talk about their process is akin to sitting in the “war room” on Draft Day for a professional sports franchise. Who’s on the board right now? Who’s looking to move soon? Whose boss just took a new job? Yes, it can be almost as exciting as getting ready to make that first round draft pick. Who said recruiting couldn’t be a blast? :)
  • They have a process in place so that interactions are tracked and effort isn’t duplicated. Similar to how sales organizations have a pipeline and track most, if not all, interactions with prospects, the world’s best recruiting organizations have a strong process in place. The reason for this is largely common sense. If you’re aggressively reaching out to thousands of candidates you can’t afford to slow down to check with a colleague as to whether you’ve already contacted someone. And you have to have information at your fingertips when you engage.

There are a variety of ways to do this. Lots of people use Entelo to track engagement. We’ve written extensively on how you can use Highrise for this (and especially the Highrise-Rapportive integration). And there are a host of other options as well, such as using your ATS (will work better or worse depending on which ATS you are using) or a CRM system like Salesforce, etc. But don’t resort to spreadsheets or managing this stuff in email. There are just too many solutions out there that will scale better and more importantly, will allow you to retain important information even as people come and go from your recruiting team.

No doubt almost all of you are reaching out to passive candidates right now. But can you be more aggressive? Not in the harassing way (we covered that extensively in the Outbound Recruiting 101 blog posts) but rather in the “we’re going to make sure we get on the radar of as many high-quality candidates as possible” way.

Stay tuned for more secrets of world class recruiting organizations!

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