Passive V's Active Candidates

Passive v Active candidates

By Scott Daly Founder of Woodford Gray Group

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When you are hiring finding the best person for the role as well as the business should be the number one goal. Best, meaning a person that makes a positive difference within the company, and is suited to the culture and ambition of the business, as well as the role that they are being sourced for. So how do you tailor your recruitment strategy to ensure you select only the best?

When recruiting, it is important to consider the market and role that you are hiring into as this will have a great emphasis on the appropriate strategy used to source the candidates. In any market and at any level, you will come across three types of candidates, active, actively-passive and passive candidates.

Take our market as an example - we specialise in handling recruitment assignments for some of the UK’s fastest growing private equity, venture Capital backed, entrepreneurially led, private sector businesses.

Predominantly, two types of candidates are best suited to the companies in this market – actively-passive and passive.

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An ‘actively-passive’ candidate would make themselves visible by creating and promoting a strong online presence, for example using LinkedIn, making them more visible and easier to find. This doesn’t mean that this type of candidate is easy to attract though, as although social and professional media are great tools to find your prospects, you’ve still got to contact them and get them to listen.

On the other hand, a purely passive candidate is like the hidden treasure; they are those that don’t want to be found because they are both happy and successful in their current employment. Not only do you have to get them to lift their heads from the desk, but the biggest challenge is to find them first!

Active candidates will have their eyes and ears open for the next opportunity and are more likely to respond to a job advertised in the press or online. We would actually encourage our clients to use this method as a simple, cost effective sourcing solution and can also be good for brand awareness and PR.

The real value of using a recruitment specialist is their ability to pro-actively go to market on behalf of the client as most internal HR or recruitment teams don’t have the resources, or it may be inappropriate for them to go direct. We find, in most cases, the best candidates in our market are just that - in the market, not on the market and our approach is targeted search at all levels.

This means narrowing down the search to target the market that we are hiring from and focus on the companies who have a similar culture and ambition. In our view, it is important to recognise an individual’s cultural fit – you may have found what you consider to be the best person for the role in terms of their skills and experience, however uniting the candidates’ aspirations, attitude and values to the client is essential for a long term engagement.

So regardless of whether a candidate is active, passive or actively-passive, we believe that taking the time to know the market, the job role, the company culture and ambition are essential for any talent attraction strategy and achieving top results.