The Ultimate Tools List for Finding Cleared Professionals!

Finding and hiring cleared talent is one of the most difficult recruiting tasks out there. There are many factors that the commercial space never has to deal with like we do here. And since many of those challenges have been amplified by Covid, I wanted to put together a tools list for finding and hiring cleared talent and talent for the GovCon space.  

 The following is going to be broken down into 8 sections below to try to cover each of the sets of tools that are at your disposal.

1. Cleared Employment Sites
2. Cleared Employment Events
3. General Employment Sites
4. Sourcing Tools
5. Contract Recruiters
6. Creative Recruiting
7. Your Database 
8. Recruiting and Staffing Organizations

Cleared Employment Sites 

Cleared Employment sites are some of the best tools out there because they are focused and catered just towards Cleared and GovCon professionals. Many of them also don’t give access to their databases (for a good reason) to overseas recruiting teams and companies.  

ClearanceJobs - Is probably the biggest and well-known database of Cleared Professionals. They have over 1,235,000 cleared candidate profiles, over 500,000 monthly unique monthly visitors, and over 8,000 new cleared candidates that add profiles to the site monthly. They are tools that I personally have used for a decade and will continue to use in the future.  

ClearedJobs.Net - This is probably the 2nd biggest job board for cleared professionals. Its a little dated on the UI but it's still a solid tool. I do have to add a caveat. They can only be utilized if you are a direct hire company. They won't allow access to placement firms and headhunters. 

Clearedcareers.com - Is another option for finding cleared candidates. They have been actively growing the last few years  

ClearedConnections - Is another resource out there. I have made a few hires over the years for positions with some obscure cleared skill sets.  

Cleared Employment Events

There is always the battle of the effectiveness and cost-benefit of attending job fairs for recruiting. Many times they are great for branding, keeping your company or team name out there in the public space so that candidates continue to search for you as you are hiring. But the quick return on investment many times is not there. After going to over 100 different hiring events and career fairs these are the best ones that I have seen for bang for the buck around the Cleared and GovCon Space. 

reStart Cleared Virtual Fair 

TechExpo

ClearedJobs.Net

ClearanceJobs Events

General Employment Sites

There a thousand different large and small job boards and sites out there where you could find cleared individuals. Many of them work, but many of them are also have to do more digging because many of the candidates don't have their clearance information on their resumes on those sites because so many people have access to those job boards stateside and overseas. 

Monster - One of the largest legacy Databases out there is still a decent source for finding cleared candidates. Because of the name recognition many people still head this job site to upload their resume. Also since most people typically stay in the cleared field one of the biggest assets is opening up your search to include many years back.

Dice - One would think that this could be a better-Cleared Resume database but its not, but since the parent company also owns Clearance Jobs I can see them trying to focus candidates towards the cleared database than anything else. But if you are looking for candidates outside of the DOD (Department of Defense) work or work around the IC (Intel Community) they have a great filter that you can use to separate US Citizens to search for people that are clearable or could obtain a Public Trust 

Indeed - Indeed is one of the newer job boards on the block in the last decade and they have probably done a better job advertising than anyone else. They do seem to be picking up cleared candidates. One additional plus now, anyone that has #readytowork on their resume is a free view on their resume database right now, so take advantage of that

Zip Recruiter - This is the one platform I have had the least amount of luck with on the resume database but somehow posting jobs on there I have been able to easily pick up candidates with a Secret Clearance. If you are looking for lower level clearances this could be a great option for you, but anything more focused or a higher level clearances it could be a waste of resources.

Careerbuilder - Just like Monster is a legacy database that candidates still go to and if you have a package for your team it's another place that could work. But also like Monster, there is gold in some of the older profiles. 

Linkedin - Linkedin can be good but it gets better with some of the tools I will have below in the sourcing section.   

Sourcing Tools

There are a ton of great sourcing tools that can augment what you are doing with Linkedin. Everything from Loxo Source, Recruiterly, Swordfish, Seamless.ai, Hiretual, and SignalHire, Loxo Connect, and ChatterWorks. If you want a full breakdown of how they compare I ran a test on finding TS/SCI FSP candidates that I cross-referenced in ClearanceJobs for verification of their active clearances. I have the results Here, Here, and Here. The only that is worth looking at that I didn't cover yet is SeekOut and they have an additional package that you can purchase for finding cleared candidates 

Contract Recruiters

There are times where depending on how many openings you have, the scope of the openings, and how soon the government needs those people to get started it might be best to bring on a contract recruiter or a few contract recruiters. 

There are a lot of great contract recruiters in the DC Metro that focus on bringing in exceptional talent, I am sure you know many of them. If you don't we can help bring you the contract recruiters that you need.

Personally, after a few years of contract recruiting before starting our firm, I started to notice that there was no continuing education happening. Many many of the recruiters relying on things that worked years ago. The fundamentals of recruiting will always there… But there are a lot of things that are changing with how people communicate and how to get ahold of people.  One of the things that we focus on, on top of hiring great contract recruiters for the team is monthly continuing education. I know its one of the things that sets us apart from the many other firms out there that provide contract talent to help with the cleared work.

Types Of Creative Recruiting

Creative recruiting should be something that you as a hiring manager or you as a recruitment leader should always be doing and encouraging. Covid has made it more difficult to do some of the things like putting on in-person hiring events, meetings, and networking at restaurants around certain sites with cleared talent works, or sponsoring a food truck to sit outside a certain site with your target market. But you can also cut your cost down by creating virtual events to help attract talent. Remember. Many people are zoomed out by the end of the day so make sure to create a value hook to help the event become successful.

Boolean Searching - This might be one of the most surprising things I have seen in the recruiting space is the lack of recruiters that can do basic boolean searching. I have had a few over the years that have even asked me what it is. If you are not familiar with it at all there are many sources out there where you can learn about it deeper like SourceCon on Tricia Tamkin's class here. Here is an example from SourcCon on ways to find cleared candidates in unconventional ways. You might not think that this is creative recruiting, but in today's world, it is. I personally have been able to find a cleared scientist from a conference list that was accidentally published and a cleared engineer from a black and white image search with the right search string on Google. It is something to learn and get better at 

Creative Email Copy - You have to learn how to stand out in the crowd in a field of hundreds of companies and thousands of recruiters chasing the cleared talent. Candidates are sick of basic emails that all look the same. Just think about… What kind of emails do you personally respond to? Creative copy for emails reminds me of Abraham Lincon when he said that he had 8 hours to cut down a tree. He would spend 6 hours of that time sharpening the ax before starting to cut down the tree. It’s the same way with recruiting. How many hours do you spend finding the perfect candidate only to send them a junk email that looks like every other email they get from every other recruiter. Learn to write better emails.

Marketing Automation - How many times have you ever received an email and thought to yourself ill get back to that and got busy. I do it all the time. There is so much noise out there and we all get hundreds of emails per day. There is software out there where you can automate the following messages to candidates till they respond. Personally, I see a lot of success in candidate responses by the 2nd or 3rd email. With a combination of good email copy and marketing automation, I have had marketing campaigns set up for TS/SCI Poly candidates that had open rates in the 80% and reply rates in the 60% range. There are a lot of ATS systems out there that have it baked into the platform, but if it's not an option you want to start looking at a platform as soon as possible.  

Digital Marketing - For the moment this is one of the most underutilized goldmines of recruiting. With digital marketing, you can target the list of people that you already have, target a list of people that want to try to hire, or even retarget candidates that reach your site or career site.  

Outsourcing Your Recruiting Overseas - Just don’t do it. I know your competitors are doing it to save a few bucks, but don’t take the chance of you being the news story of how you sent your cleared recruiting support overseas. Then something happened and you ended up having one of our adversaries building up a database of cleared talent at your request. A news story like that would just sink your whole company you get barred from supporting any cleared or government work as a company in the future.  

Your Own Database

This is always one of the most underutilized tools out there in the cleared space. As you know most of these people are not looking for positions until a contract change comes about. So starting and keeping your own database can be a game-changer.  This dawned on me years ago when I hired a contract recruiter for a team I was supporting and within the first few weeks, he was crushing it. He walked with his own database that he built up over the years and started to reach out to his actual network and not just the network that many people talk about and then hop on Linkedin and the job boards. If you are reading this and you are an internal recruiter in the space, make sure to start building up your own database because you will be using it years from now.

Recruiting and Staffing Organizations

It’s always important in this space to have a dedicated team that you can pull in for difficult searches. Whether it's an executive or leadership search that needs to be kept quiet, or you are dealing with a short time frame because the government dropped the winning announcement at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend and you need to get the positions filled quickly, or you have some difficult roles but need your team of recruiters focused on filling the volume of the contract or internal positions. Having a team that understands the space is always important to have. If you would like to schedule a call to see if we could be a good match for your organization feel free to reach out to us here or schedule a time to chat here.

Join me on upcoming episodes of the Elite Recruiter Podcast on Apple or Spotify!

Need to hire? Need Training in anything above? We can help! This article was written by Benjamin Mena who is a Managing Partner of Select Source Solutions which is a boutique executive recruitment firm specializing in Data Science, Cyber Security, Talent Acquisition, and Government Contracting.