Now to address this quote of yours; “The ugly truth is that proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need has many intrinsic limitations and hidden costs that no one seems to want to think or talk about.”

You’re right however many companies who employ recruiters view them as overhead. Therefore in order for management to feel good about the buying decision to employ a recruiter that person needs to continue building a pipeline especially when business is slow to justify their existence. That is the “Ugly Truth!”

I enjoyed reading your posts very much and also believe JIT recruiting can really save time on candidates sourcing for talented recruiters like you.

But traditional way of sourcing, candidate pipeline building, has its reason to exist or prevail:

1) Organization’s need. Company wants to build up it’s database and in an organized/incremental way. So it can be shared by many recruiters within the organization. It’s an assets building process.

2) Average recruiters’ need. Talented and passionate recruiters are still a small % group. Most of recruiters still need work with some easy to use/learn tool. The instinct and passion of a great recruiter is very hard to teach or to be taught. (Your own example proved it).

Just my 2 cents.

TZ

Thoughts Mr. Blackbelt?

If I had an urgent need for 5,000 people of a similar skillset, I would sincerely hope that I’ve built a database of 10′s of 1000′s of those people, as well as have ready access to some major resume databases, so that I can quickly retrieve their records and go about contacting them. I’d argue that I would not have to have had any prior contact with those potential candidates (although it certainly wouldn’t hurt).

I can also tell you that no one can maintain any real “relationship” with 5,000 people, nor can a person keep that many people “warm.” I’d imagine that if a recruiting organization tried to do so (and it would take a whole organization), they would be spending so much time trying to stay on top of the ever-changing statuses, availability and motivators that they would never have a moment to try and source/recruit more candidates.

Opt-in email campaigns would be an excellent practical method of trying to “rapidly activate” 5,000 candidates in an attempt to achieve JIT delivery. However, I will also say that mostly automated/bulk email campaigns do not qualify as real “relationship maintenance.”

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that kind of relationship, you know it for exactly what it is – it’s very transparent.