Where can you find the MOST passive candidates?
So where do you think you can find the most passive candidates?
I think it depends heavily on how you define a passive candidate. Some would argue that anyone can qualify as a “candidate” if they can be found. That would mean that anyone on the Internet is a potential candidate. I see the reasoning behind this, but I don’t really agree. Just because you’re alive and breathing doesn’t mean I am going to label you as a “candidate.”
Let’s level-set here and define the term candidate. According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a “candidate” is “one likely or suited to undergo or be chosen for something specified.”
For me, in order for someone to be suited to be chosen for a position I am recruiting for, I have to know some things about them – at the minimum, location and profession. Ideally, I’d like to know their career history – where they’ve worked, what they’ve done, and for how long. If you want to source and recruit people who you don’t really know anything about – be prepared for a low rate of return (what I refer to as “low yield” sourcing and recruiting).
For the sake of this post, I will define a candidate as a person for which we have (or can find) either a profile or a resume that gives SOME level of detail as to the person’s location, career history and qualififcations.
So – now that we have that out of the way, I’ll ask the question again, albeit a little differently: Where do you think you can find the most passive candidates with a profile or resume?
LinkedIn? The number is growing every day – last I heard it was 34 million or so globally. Now, I could argue that not everyone on LinkedIn is a passive candidate – there’s probably a good number of folks on LinkedIn who are actually looking for a new position. But we won’t get into the definition of active and passive in this post. Also – while LinkedIn members do have professional profiles - not everyone actually fills them out. There are many LinkedIn profiles that list an employer and a title, but nothing else. In many professions, a title itself can be essentially meaningless and may not offer any reliably accurate clues as to the person’s responsibilities and experience. Some don’t even list a title – so I could argue that you can’t really consider everyone on LinkedIn as a candidate – but I’ll leave that alone. For now.
So – could it be the Internet? Certainly there are lots of people online – but how many have enough information about them for a sourcer or recruiter to make even an educated guess as to whether or not they are potentially qualified for the openings they are recruiting for and trying to fill? Let’s not forget the definition of a “candidate.” Interestingly, I recently ran a little experiment to compare the number of resumes the Internet (via Google) vs. Monster, and Monster manhandled the Internet when it came to specific hiring profiles in specific locations. So from my own research – I don’t really find a whole lot of candidates on the Internet.
Could it be Facebook or MySpace? Certainly those sites have TONS of people on them – however, in spite of those large numbers – most users don’t post much information for a sourcer or recruiter to use to determine if they could be potential candidates for specific job openings. I’m an certainly not saying that you can’t find candidates on Facebook or MySpace, but these sites are “shallow” sources of professional information and can be a low yield recruiting source when it comes to accuracy and precision.
Could it be the job boards? No, you say? Why’s that? They’re “active channel?” Hmmm – I’ve heard that term used quite a bit to describe the major online job boards, such as Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs. Being the “question everything” guy, I decided to look into this perception that the job boards consist of only “active” job seekers.
I’m aware that many sourcers and recruiters who use the job boards focus predominantly on searching for candidates who have posted their resumes within the past 30 days. Presumably, if someone posts their resume online, they’re “actively” looking for employment, right? Although I could easily argue that’s not necessarily true – I’ll give you that point for the purposes of this post.
So, if we assume that resumes that have been posted to a job board within the past 30 days are “active candidates,” what about all of those candidates on the job boards whose resumes are over 30 days old? Yep – you guessed it – let’s assume they are “passive candidates.” Did you know that some of the major job boards have resumes that are up to and over 3 years old? Can you see it coming yet?
I did some digging on the 3 major job boards to see exactly what percentage of candidates had resumes updated or entered in the past 30 days versus the percentage of candidates who had resumes with a post or update date older than 30 days.
Consistently, I found that 75% – 80% of the candidates on every major job board had resumes over 30 days old. Let’s do some math now. As with LinkedIn, the total number of people with resumes Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs is a moving target, but based on their published figures, all together they easily have over 75,000,000 resumes. That means that there are approximately 56,000,000 to 60,000,000 “passive candidates” on the 3 major job boards.
Wait – I’m not done yet. LinkedIn’s 34,000,000 and growing population is international. The 56,000,000 to 60,000,000 figure for the 3 major job boards is just in the United States alone.
So where can you find the most passive candidates with profiles and/or resumes that offer you some degree of insight into their location, experience, and qualifications? It could be the place that most people would least suspect – the online job boards.
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