When most people talk about “passive recruiting,” they’re referring to the practice of targeting and recruiting so-called “passive candidates” – people who are not actively looking to make a move from their current employer.

If you accept that notion – what would be the opposite?

Active recruiting?

Think about it for a moment. Neither phrase even makes sense grammatically. The “passive” in “passive recruiting” isn’t being used to describe the type of recruiting being performed – it’s being used to describe the type of candidates being recruited. 

In this article, I challenge the notion of “passive recruiting,” implore you to retire the phrase, and introduce the concepts of active and passive sourcing.  

Passive Recruiting?

What could “passive recruiting” possibly mean if you’re not using “passive” to describe the types of candidates being targeted?

Recruiting is intrinsically an active process - it requires action and active participation. So “passive recruiting” doesn’t actually exist!

However, if you don’t want to let go of the oft-overused phrase, my take on “passive recruiting” zeroes in on the talent identification phase of the recruiting life cycle. It actually is possible to take a passive role in candidate sourcing.

How?

If you’re sorting through, contacting and recruiting candidates who have responded to your job postings – you’re not having to actually find the candidates…they’re coming to you.

If you’re tracking down, contacting and recruiting candidates that have been referred to you by employees of your company or other candidates - you’re not having to actually identify the candidates…someone else has already done that for you.

Make no mistake – recruiting people who have responded to job postings and people who have been referred to you is an active process, whether the people are looking to make a change in employment or not. However, the candidate sourcing step is passive and reactive – the people have already been identified for you. 

So if you simply must use continue to use the phrase “passive recruiting,” please make sure that you use it to describe the process of recruiting people who have already been identified for you. 

Active Recruiting?

As I’ve already mentioned – recruiting is intrinsically an active process. Anyone who performs the recruiting function is performing “active recruiting,” regardless of the candidate’s job search status (active, passive, not looking…).

However, you can probably guess how I would distinguish the opposite of my more accurate definition of “passive recruiting.” Yes – it has to do with the candidate sourcing step of the recruiting life cycle.

If the candidates aren’t coming to you by way of ad responses and employee referrals, you’re taking an active role in the talent identification phase because you have to go out and hunt them down with no help from anyone else.

Let’s Move Forward!

Just because a whole bunch of people use the same phrase over and over to describe something, it doesn’t make it right. “Passive recruiting” is one of those concepts that has been perpetuated for years without much thought as to what it really means, which has resulted in widespread misuse.

Not only does it not make any grammatical sense – it doesn’t even really exist. It’s impossible for a recruiter to take a passive role in the recruiting process – you’re either recruiting someone or you’re not.

If you happen to be recruiting people who are passive and non-job seekers - you’re not passively recruiting…you’re actively recruiting passive candidates!

Don’t be a lemming and continue to follow the crowd – just let it “passive recruiting” go.

Now when you overhear someone use the phrase “passive recruiting” to describe the process of recruiting passive candidates, you can be “that” recruiter who says ”Actually, you know the phrase ‘passive recruiting’ doesn’t make any sense…”

Passive and Active Sourcing

In all seriousness, I would like to advance and update the recruiting vocabulary by introducing the concepts of passive and active sourcing.

Passive sourcing: Not taking an active role in finding candidates to recruit because the candidates are identified for you – identifying potential candidates primarily through job postings and employee referrals.

Active sourcing: Finding potential candidates to recruit that don’t come to you – identifying potential candidates primarily through e-sourcing and cold calling. 

Notice how the adjectives of “active” and “passive” are not describing the job search status of the candidates being found (which is actually irrelevant, IMO), but rather (and correctly, I might add) describe to the type of sourcing being performed. 

Recruiting is intrinsically an active process, regardless of candidate job search status. However, the means of identifying the candidates you recruit isn’t.  

What do you think?

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.

I recently had a recruiter ask me if there were any way to be able to search LinkedIn for people who have worked at a specific company in the past, but who are NOT currently working for that company.

I can see why some Sourcers and Recruiters would want to specifically target people who are not currently at a company, but have worked there in the past. I’ve done a bit of digging on this, and I have yet to find a way to reliably targeting past experience while ensuring that you only get results of people who are not currently working at the target company.  When searching within your network on LinkedIn, as you may know, the only controllable option you have is to be able to search for people who are currently at target companies. If you leave the “current companies only” option unchecked, you will get results with a mix of people who are currently employed at your target company as well as those who are no longer working there. Also – when searching inside your own network – you are limited to results of people to whom you are connected up to the 3rd degree.
 
Going beyond your own LinkedIn network, you can try using Google and other Internet search engines and employ the site: command to search into LinkedIn – but we have to be aware that this is not a method that affords you precise control over current or past experience.  However, I’m going to give Google, Exalead, and AltaVista a thorough LinkedIn Boolean workout.

Let’s begin with some Google basics. For example – if you were using Google to search into LinkedIn and try to find people who have worked at Lockheed Martin at some point in their career and, for the case of this exercise, currently live in the Denver area, you could use this search and enter any additional specific search terms you might be targeting where I have SKILL/TITLE1, SKILL/TITLE2, etc:

That gets pretty clean results – I checked several pages worth. However, if you run into false positive hits like answers or jobs, you can try adding the following:

-inurl:jobid -inurl:answers

When you execute the search, you’ll see that it pulls results of people who are currently working at Lockheed Martin as well as people who have worked there in the past. Not really different from attempts made searching within your LinkedIn network  – with the exception that you will likely find more people since you are no longer limited to the size of your personal network or LinkedIn’s limit of 500 results.

Exalead
I thought of using Exalead (www.exalead.com/search) in an attempt to exploit the fact that Exalead recognizes the NEAR proximity operator. Using the NEAR operator, we can try to force certain words to be close to the word “past” or NOT in their current position in an effort to try and search people’s past experience specifically.  This is not an exact science, but it’s worth a shot.

This search is trying to find people who mention Lockheed on their profile, but who are not currently employed at Lockheed:

site:www.linkedin.com -inurl:jobid -inurl:find -intitle:directory -inurl:answers -inurl:updates “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (current NEAR Lockheed)
 
Checking the results, you can see that it works relatively well, but not perfectly, mostly due to the structure of LinkedIn’s profile page – current and past experience are listed so close together that trying to use the NOT/- operator in conjunction with NEAR will cause problems, such as eliminating results we actually want. FYI – Exalead does not appear to recognize “-(current NEAR Lockheed)” exactly as it does “NOT (current NEAR Lockheed).”  Running searches back to back switching out the – and NOT yield slightly different results.

I tried a variation of that theme, trying to avoid profiles of people who list Lockheed as their current/most recent employer in the career history section of their profile:

site:www.linkedin.com -inurl:jobid -inurl:find -intitle:directory -inurl:answers -inurl:updates “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (experience NEAR Lockheed)

This search seemed to work well – better than the above search, in my opinion, and it’s interesting to note that a good number of the page 1 results have profiles of people who have headers stating they are currently at Lockheed, but when you scroll down to their experience section, they are in fact, not currently working at Lockheed. So this search string worked relatively well.

Here is yet another variation on the theme – what we’re doing here is avoiding profiles of people who mention Lockheed in the current title/employer field, and it appears to work well:

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (”greater denver area” NEAR Lockheed)

AltaVista
Now that we’ve given Exalead a workout, I figured I would turn to an old favorite of many – AltaVista.

I first tried running the last search I just ran on Exalead:
site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (”greater denver area” NEAR Lockheed)

It only returned 1 result – so Exalead wins this round. For anyone interested – the search executed exactly the same when I used “AND NOT.”

Then I turned to one of AltaVista’s coolest and most powerful features- configurable proximity searching.  If you’d like a refresher on AltaVista’s advanced Boolean operators, check this link out: (http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/av/review.html)

This next search tries to eliminate results of people with profiles that mention Lockheed within 7 words of the word “current” on their profile:

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (current ~~7 Lockheed)

Strangely enough – that search only returned 6 results. The first result is odd because Lockheed is definitely mentioned within 7 words of Lockheed, but the rest seem to be good results – people who are not currently at Lockheed. However, 7 results is a little on the small side.

FYI – it appears to run identically with or without parentheses. However, switching between the – and NOT where we have (current ~~7 Lockheed) does change the results – not just the number, but the actually results themselves. Odd.

Here is another search we have already run on Exalead, which attempts to avoid results of people with profiles that have Lockheed mentioned within 10 words or so of “experience:”

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (experience NEAR Lockheed)

That yielded only 2 results on AltaVista vs. 61 on Exalead – so Exalead maintains its lead, pun intended.

Alright – time to try and get Black Belt on AltaVista.

I attempted to invoke AltaVista’s power of proximity AND order – trying to find profiles that mention Lockheed but not Lockheed mentioned before the word “past,” which, according to the standard LinkedIn profile structure (assuming everyone uses it, of course) would mean they are currently at Lockheed. Trying to prevent “Lockheed” from showing up before the word “past” SHOULD work based on the majority of the LinkedIn profiles I have seen.

site:www.linkedin.com “greater denver area” Lockheed -intitle:directory -intitle:updated NOT (lockheed < past)

This did work – but it yielded only 12 results and some of the people do currently work at work   at Lockheed.

I then tried to prevent “Lockheed” from appearing before the location on the profile – which is a field/area where, if utilized, is where many people list where they currently work.

site:www.linkedin.com “greater denver area” Lockheed -intitle:directory -intitle:updated NOT (lockheed < “greater denver area”)

This search did run, yielding 12 results. However, it definitely let slip through some people who do mention Lockheed before “Greater Denver Area”

And now…let’s give Google another shot.

While Google does not support proximity searching in the form of the NEAR operator or configurable proximity (shame on you Google – really), we can try to approximate proximity searching by making use of Google’s single word wildcard operator – the asterisk.

What I will try to do is use multiple asterisks, representing multiple wildcard words, and combine it with the NOT operator, to attempt to prevent results of people who mention “Lockheed” within 2 – 5 words of words that would indicate that they might currently be employed there, such as “current” or “experience” or “greater denver area.”

In this search, I am trying to avoid Trying to avoid the word “Lockheed” within 2-5 words after “Current:”

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed -”current**Lockheed” -”current***Lockheed” -”current****Lockheed” -”current*****Lockheed”

That search ran and yielded 106, but many of the results have “Lockheed” mentioned within 5 words of the word “current.”

Out of curiosity, I tried spacing out the asterisks:

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed -”current * * Lockheed” -”current * * * Lockheed” -”current * * * * Lockheed” -”current * * * * * Lockheed”

That search ran and yielded what appears to be the exact same 106 results – so spacing the asterisks does not appear to have any different effect, at least in this specific case.

Next, I decided to switch out the – to NOT for the Lockheed-related statements, again, mostly out of curiosity, and neither of the below searches ran:

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT “current * * Lockheed” NOT “current * * * Lockheed” NOT “current * * * * Lockheed” NOT “current * * * * * Lockheed”

site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:directory -intitle:updated “greater denver area” Lockheed NOT (”current**Lockheed”) NOT (”current***Lockheed”) NOT (”current****Lockheed”) NOT (”current*****Lockheed”)

Perhaps Google’s single word wildcard asterisk operator doesn’t work well when combined with the -/NOT operator.  Has anyone else experimented within combining them?  If so, please let me know.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this exercise in attempting to isolate and target profiles of people on LinkedIn who have worked for a company in the past, but are not current employees of that target company. I know I learned a few things along the way – that Exalead does a good job with proximity via the NEAR operator, that some of AltaVista’s proximity operators (NEAR and before) don’t seem to work as well as they should, and that Google’s asterisk operator doesn’t seem to play nice with the NOT operator.