I believe sourcing for candidates is like fishing.

When people go fishing, they are aware of the fish they can actually see in the water and of course the fish they catch. However, most people who go fishing don’t spend any time wondering about all of the fish in the pond, lake, or ocean they are fishing in that they have access to, but never catch.

Similarly, when most people source for candidates – they are only aware of the candidates they find. They don’t give much thought to all of the great candidates they actually have access to, but fail to find, review, or even recognize as a potential match. 

I recently spoke at a Technology Association of Georgia’s (TAG) Recruiting Society event about this very concept. Below is a modified version of the presentation, edited to make more sense given that you don’t have the benefit of seeing/hearing me address the slides.

Enjoy!

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?

After recently writing about moving beyond the hype of social media and recruiting, I took some time to reflect quite a bit on the topic, and focused a critical eye on exactly what “Social Recruiting” is.

While there is no shortage of what people think “Social Recruiting” is, quite frankly - I’m not satisfied with any of the definitions and explanations I’ve found – most are too surface level and one-dimensional, as well as inaccurate, in my opinion. It seems that a large portion of what many people seem to be happy to accept as “Social Recruiting” is really nothing more than traditional job posting and employer marketing and branding in a 2.0 environment.

However, I can definitely appreciate the challenge of trying to nail down an accurate and concise definition of “Social Recruiting” – it’s quite the slippery fish. So rather than trying to answer the question of “What is Social Recruiting?,” I’m going to tell you what I think Social Recruiting is NOT.

Social Recruiting is NOT Posting Jobs and Press Releases

Posting job openings on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is not Social Recruiting – it’s simply posting jobs on social networking sites. Job posting is job posting – there’s nothing ”social” about it, regardless of where the jobs are posted.

On Tuesday, January 19th, 2010, I posed this question on Twitter: 

Here are some of the insightful responses I received:

• @CMcKenzie77 Where’s the “social” piece if a company only posts jd’s & news releases? #socialrecruiting -Its missing conversation..Rt?
• @IrishRecruiter If company only posts job and press releases on Twitter, it is NOT #socialrecruiting. It’s nothing…
• @mysensay No, that’s just a corporate website or job board dressed up as a Twitter account.
• @jeroenkneppers no way. Both posting jobs & press releases is 1.0 sending in a 2.0 environment. Social Media is about conversation
• @aglogan No not IMO. Personally I don’t think it’s any different to advertising on a job board. The tweets offer no value.
• @julesmontgo If your admin can do it, it’s not #socialrecruiting. No offense to the admins…
• @anniechae Where’s the human touch in job posting/press releases? I prefer connecting, relating & interacting with what’s b/t the ears
• @tombolt There can be active or passive recruiting, but only using twitter passively is missing the point of #socialrecruiting.
• @TimDineen it’d be best if corps forget “managing” accounts /strategy and just be human #socialrecruiting
• @jayveniard no it’s not social recruiting its social media marketing…corporate TA will say it’s recruiting
• @davecarhart Definitely not. Unfortunately that style accounts for the good majority of corp recruiting accounts

These talent acquisition professionals on Twitter all agree that just posting jobs and press releases on Twitter isn’t social recruiting. In fact, I did not receive a single response to the contrary.

I particularly liked @jayveniard’s assessment that posting jobs using Twitter is social media marketing. I agree. Posting open jobs anywhere is simply promoting and distributing an opportunity for employment. Can anyone make a solid argument that posting jobs is “recruiting,” regardless of where the jobs are posted?

Social Recruiting is NOT Sourcing Candidates on Social Networks

Searching LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to find potential candidates isn’t Social Recruiting. Talent identification is only 1 step in the entire recruiting life cycle (albeit a critical one!). If anything, it’s “Social Sourcing.”

Regardless of what you would like to label it - there’s nothing social about identifying candidates. You don’t even need to be human to source candidates from social networking sites – there are apps that can do that. 

Social Recruiting is NOT Just Having a Facebook Fan Page

Have a corporate Facebook Fan Page? Awesome! Have a bunch of cool ”What it’s like to work at…” and community involvement videos, links to awards from major magazines, press releases, etc.? Great!

However – is any of that really recruiting? Isn’t that just marketing and branding? 

Yes, it’s a no-brainer to have job search functionality directly on your Facebook Fan Page, to post jobs opportunities, and link to your corporate website from your FBFP. But job search, job postings, and website links do not a ”Social Recruiting” strategy make.

Social Recruiting is NOT Just Being on Twitter

While the “Big 4″ firms are often used as leading examples of how to leverage social media for recruiting, how “social” is it to only follow 15 people on Twitter? How about following only 1 person? Where’s the engagement and the 2-way communication?

Wait – it gets better. Is it very social to only follow your own Twitter accounts? 

I won’t name names – you can do the research. You’ll be shocked.

So if you have a corporate Twitter account and you don’t follow (m)any people, you don’t really respond to anyone, and you’re only posting jobs and content from feeds – how “social” is that? 

That’s called talking and not listening.

Which is really interesting given that many Social Media “gurus” claim that one of the biggest opportunities presented by Social Media lies in listening. 

#thingsthatmakeyougohmm

Social Recruiting is NOT Going to Replace Job Boards

It’s currently popular to trash job boards, proclaim they are dying, and say that social media is delivering the coup de grâce, but job boards aren’t going anywhere.

You see – for all of their supposed flaws, job boards actually serve a purpose.

It’s simply convenient to go to a place and find a large collection of jobs to search through. Sure, you can use any search engine to look for jobs, but that actually doesn’t make much sense. Why use an Internet search engine to search for jobs? 

Try going to Google anyway and enter something like: Java Software Engineer Jobs. Check out the results. 

I see Indeed, Dice, Careerbuilder, Monster, WashingtonPost.com, and LinkedIn (which most people think is more job board that social networking site, btw).

While Indeed is technically different “under the hood” from traditional job boards because it’s a meta/vertical search engine for job listings – it’s still a website with a bunch of jobs.

Which is what job seekers – active, casual, and even some “passive” – want and need. It’s simply convenient to go to one or a few websites to search for and review jobs. What’s the alternative? Individually search 100’s to 1000’s of corporate websites? Label sites like Indeed and Simplyhired whatever you want, but you won’t change the purpose they serve.

If you want to buy a car, you go where cars are sold. If you want to scope out potential jobs, you go where the jobs are. Yes, I know job boards are the root of all evil – but they actually serve a purpose, even if they’re imperfect and fail to serve that purpose as well as they could.

There is nothing that social media can do to eliminate the desire and need to conveniently search jobs on websites that have the most employers and opportunities listed. When you go shopping, do you really want to go to a store that has a small inventory with a limited variety? Some people, maybe? Most people, no. 

Your Thoughts?

“Social Recruiting” is the hot phrase in talent acquisition these days, but make no mistake - social media and social networking sites aren’t intrinsically “social.”

It’s the people using social media and social networking sites to be social – to listen, engage, and interact in two-way conversations – that’s the ”social” part. Unless recruiters and companies are using social media to have two-way conversations with potential candidates (instead of a one-way, one-to-many shotgun blast approach), social media isn’t any more “social” than a job board or a phone on the hook. 

Now that I’ve drawn a line in the sand and delineated what Social Recruiting is NOT, I’d like to hear from you what you think Social Recruiting IS.

Do you ever use social networks to such as LinkedIn to search for people with experience in a specific industry?

If you do, I can almost guarantee you that you are not finding everyone you’re looking for.

How?

There are intrinsic issues associated with any user generated content, especially when it comes to how users of social media identify themselves, and they can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for.  

Telecommunications Example

Let’s say you are looking for software engineers with Java development and telecommunications industry experience. On LinkedIn, it would be logical to select the “Telecommunications” under the industries option list.

If you made this logical choice, you would get everyone who matches your keyword search and who selected “Telecommunications” on their LinkedIn profile.

That’s great. But would you get everyone who actually had telecommunications industry experience?

No.

How do I know?

Let Me Show You

All you have to do is run a search for people who currently work for a major telecom company who mention Java, and then take a look at the industries they selected on their profiles. For my example, I’ll use Verizon. 

This is what I got:

I see 4 different industries in the first 4 search results alone: Internet, Information Technology and Services, Computer Software, and Telecommunications. 

And there’s more:

Looking at that industry list, we now know that if we wanted to use LinkedIn’s industry search option to find people who currently work at Verizon who mention Java on their LinkedIn profiles, we’d have to use the 10 different industries on the list above. 

If you didn’t – and I would estimate about 99% of sourcers and recruiters don’t - you would miss 474 people who actually DO have telecommunications industry experience (current, even). In fact, you would assume those 474 people don’t exist, because you wouldn’t even be aware that your search prevented you from finding them. This is a perfect example of what I call a Hidden Talent Pool.

In this example, sourcers and recruiters would be missing over 50% of the total relevant results available!

Why Does This Happen?

It’s simple, really.

When people create or edit their LinkedIn profile, they choose an industry from the list that they feel most accurately identifies them.

So even if someone works as a software engineer for AT&T, they could choose to select “Internet” instead of “Telecommunications,” because they identify themselves as an Internet developer, rather than a telecommunications industry employee.   

This phenomenon isn’t limited to telecommunications – it affects every industry. 

Let’s Try Pharmaceuticals

If a sourcer or recruiter were looking for director-level marketing talent in the pharmaceutical industry and they searched for a current title of “director,” a keyword of “marketing,” and selected the “Pharmaceuticals” industry, they would find  a lot of results – but they would most certainly not find everyone who fits the profile.

To illustrate this, let’s look for people who have worked for Pfizer, who have a current title of director, and who mention ”marketing” in their profile. We can see 3 different industries in the first 4 results alone: 

A sourcer or recruiter who relied on using the “Pharmaceuticals” industry selection to search for and find candidates would be missing at least 573 people who have worked for Pfizer, who have a title of “director” and mention marketing in their profile, because those 573 people selected an industry other than “Pharmaceuticals:”

I stress at least because if you noticed in the telecom/Verizon example as well as the pharma/Pfizer example, when you click “show more” on the industries list, you see 11 total options: 1 saying “All Industries,” and 10 specific industries - and yet if you look closely at the totals in both examples I used, the numbers don’t add up.

I suspect that when you click “show more:”

…LinkedIn only shows the top 10 industries in addition to “All Industries,” even when there are more than 10. I can’t state this as fact, but since the numbers don’t add up, I’ll chalk it up to an educated assumption. Only LinkedIn could actually confirm or deny. 

The Heart of the Issue

50% of the issue at work here is that many people have experience working in multiple industries, yet they can only select one on their LinkedIn profile.

If you’re looking for someone with “Defense & Space” industry experience on LinkedIn, you cannot find the people who have significant Defense and Space Industry experience who currently work in another industry, and happen to have selected that current industry on their LinkedIn profile. 

The other 50% comes from the fact that people can and will identify themselves in any way they want to – which may have nothing to do with the way YOU would identify or label them.

A marketing professional working for a pharmaceutical company can just as easily think of themselves in the “Consumer Goods” industry when making the selection on their LinkedIn profile. 

Final Thoughts

I hope that what I’ve shown you so far has your mind racing, thinking about all of the candidates you’re missing when you use LinkedIn’s industry search option.

If you think you’re not affected by this issue, think again.

This is not limited to any industry, skillset, or even a particular social network – Twitter and Facebook are even worse!

Anything above Level 1 Sourcing is 99% thinking, 1% syntax. Electronic talent identification requires curiosity, creativity, interpretive ability, and analytical thought - 4 things that Dr. Michio Kaku believes cannot be achieved with artificial intelligence.

I happen to agree.

So if you’re good at these things – creative thought, being curious and analytical, and you’re able to think outside of the box - you can feel confident you won’t be replaced by a matching application any time in the near future.

Happy hunting!

Have you ever wanted or needed to search for people who have achieved high grade point averages in high school or college?

While GPA is relatively unimportant to many employers – to others, a high GPA is indicative of a person’s ability to achieve results in an unstructured environment (no one is there making you go to class or study for your exams), which can provide clues to self-management capability and the drive to excel. Some employers simply won’t hire candidates for certain roles without a specific GPA or higher, with few exceptions (e.g. Google).

Regardless of your personal philosophy on the (in)significance of GPA’s, a grade point average is an objective measure of performance and achievement, and one of the very few that can be found on a resume or a social media profile.

Caveat Emptor

Before I show you how to specifically search for and target GPA’s when searching for people in LinkedIn, you need to be aware that most people who create LinkedIn profiles typically do not fill them out as they would if they were writing a resume. That means that the majority of profiles you come across won’t actually have a lot of depth and detail with regard to their experience as well as their education, including GPA. However, it does appear that more and more people are beginning to see the value in leveraging their LinkedIn profile much as they would a resume, and most people who have achieved a high grade point average in high school and/or college see the value in promoting their achievement. 

Searching for GPA’s

While it would be nice if LinkedIn supported numrange search like Google (3.50..4.00), or even root-word/stem search like most job board resume databases (3.5* OR 3.6* OR 3.7*), LinkedIn doesn’t support either search functionality. As such, you’ll need to actually type out each and every specific GPA within the range you would like to target.

Wow. I know – that can be A LOT of numbers. But, lucky for you, I’ve done the work for you (at least for the range of 3.5 to 4.0), AND – LinkedIn can process the longest search strings of any search interface/engine I have ever used.

That means you can enter this string into the keyword field on LinkedIn when searching for people and you’ll get results mentioning high academic acheivement (graduating with honors/GPA of 3.5 or higher, in this case):

(GPA OR “G.P.A.” OR “Grade Point Average”) (”cum laude” OR “3.5″ OR “3.6″ OR “3.7″ OR “3.8″ OR “3.9″ OR ”4.0″ OR “3.50″ OR “3.51″ OR “3.52″ OR “3.53″ OR “3.54″ OR “3.55″ OR “3.56″ OR “3.57″ OR “3.58″ OR “3.59″ OR “3.60″ OR “3.61″ OR “3.62″ OR “3.63″ OR “3.64″ OR “3.65″ OR “3.66″ OR “3.67″ OR “3.68″ OR “3.69″ OR “3.70″ OR “3.71″ OR “3.72″ OR “3.73″ OR “3.74″ OR “3.75″ OR “3.76″ OR “3.77″ OR “3.78″ OR “3.79″ OR “3.80″ OR “3.81″ OR “3.82″ OR “3.83″ OR “3.84″ OR “3.85″ OR “3.86″ OR “3.87″ OR “3.88″ OR “3.89″ OR “3.90″ OR “3.91″ OR “3.92″ OR “3.93″ OR “3.94″ OR “3.95″ OR “3.96″ OR “3.97″ OR “3.98″ OR “3.99″)

Yes – that actually fits in the keyword search field. Surprised? I’ve written about this a few times – LinkedIn seems to have no limit to the number of characters you can enter into the search fields. In fact, I’ve crammed 6 pages of text into a LinkedIn search and not only did it fit, there was room for more! LinkedIn search team – you get BIG bonus points for this! 

CRITIAL NOTE!

Unfortunately, my blog’s theme/CSS changes the straight up-and-down quotation marks that are generated in Notepad, LinkedIn, Google, etc, into curved quotation marks as you would typically see in MS Word (see image below). As such YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SIMPLY COPY AND PASTE the GPA search string above into LinkedIn because it will not run properly. You will have to copy the string into Notepad and change all curved quotation marks to the straight up-and-down quotation marks generated by Notepad. 

Here is an example of the difference:

Believe it or not, if you use curved quotation marks, your search might actually run, but it will not run as intended, and it will not return the exact same results as if you had used the Notepad-style quotes or simply typed them directly into LinkedIn.

Latin Honors

Notice that I included “cum laude,” which is a Latin honor for distinguished academic achievement. “Cum laude” is also embedded into each of the most common higher honors of magna cum laude and summa cum laude – so searching for the base phrase will return all three. While the percentages (e.g., top 2%, 5%, 10%, etc.) or specific grade point averages required for each level of academic honor can differ from university to university, they will typically cover the range of high “B” to 4.00 grade point averages. I have come across some profiles that do not mention a specific GPA, but do mention 1 of the 3 Latin honors, so I decided to throw “cum laude” in to catch those people.

4.00

You also probably noticed I did not include 4.00 in the range of numbers. I originally did, but in testing the search string, I found that it produced too many false positives mentioning the 4.00 scale and a GPA that did not in fact meet my GPA criteria of 3.5x or higher. For example:

However, the downside to leaving 4.00 out is that it will potentially miss those who did achieve a perfect 4.00 on a 4.00 scale and did not mention any Latin honors on their LinkedIn profile. I’ll leave that choice to you.

The LinkedIn GPA Search in Action

To narrow the results down a bit, I will add “software engineer” as the current title, and also add “Java” to the keyword search, searching the entire United States.

Java (GPA OR “G.P.A.” OR “Grade Point Average”) (”cum laude” OR “3.5″ OR “3.6″ OR “3.7″ OR “3.8″ OR “3.9″ OR ”4.0″ OR “3.50″ OR “3.51″ OR “3.52″ OR “3.53″ OR “3.54″ OR “3.55″ OR “3.56″ OR “3.57″ OR “3.58″ OR “3.59″ OR “3.60″ OR “3.61″ OR “3.62″ OR “3.63″ OR “3.64″ OR “3.65″ OR “3.66″ OR “3.67″ OR “3.68″ OR “3.69″ OR “3.70″ OR “3.71″ OR “3.72″ OR “3.73″ OR “3.74″ OR “3.75″ OR “3.76″ OR “3.77″ OR “3.78″ OR “3.79″ OR “3.80″ OR “3.81″ OR “3.82″ OR “3.83″ OR “3.84″ OR “3.85″ OR “3.86″ OR “3.87″ OR “3.88″ OR “3.89″ OR “3.90″ OR “3.91″ OR “3.92″ OR “3.93″ OR “3.94″ OR “3.95″ OR “3.96″ OR “3.97″ OR “3.98″ OR “3.99″)

When I ran that search I got 1,061 results. Remember – if you are going to copy and paste the GPA string above, before running it in LinkedIn be sure to copy it to Notepad and change all of the curved quotation marks to Notepad’s quotation marks – otherwise, you will not get the proper results.

The Anomlies

When examining the search results, I noticed a number of anomalies.

#1 LinkedIn highlights single, non-GPA numbers throughout the profiles.

#2 Although I searched specifically for the title of “Software Engineer” using LinkedIn’s title field, I still got results with the single words of “software” and “engineer” highlighted throughout the profile and not just in titles. LinkedIn search team – this should not happen.

#3 Some results would have the word “a” highlighted by itself throughout the profile.

#4 In many cases, the actual GPA, as well as the mention of “GPA” or “Grade Point Average” were not actually highlighted, although they matched the search criteria.

For example:

I am not surprised by some of the anomalous results – many search engines have trouble when it comes to searching for numbers, especially those including decimals, and search terms including punctuation such as periods (e.g., G.P.A, B.S., etc.).

The Results

In spite of the anomalies mention above, from the random sampling of results I took, the GPA search worked quite well, with few false positives:

Targeting Specific Universities

Taking this GPA search approach one step further, you could combine it with targeting specific colleges and universities.

For example, I took the same GPA search from above, included ”Java” in the keyword field, searched for a title of (engineer OR programmer OR developer), and looked for profiles of people who graduated from one of these schools:  (harvard OR Duke OR Yale OR MIT OR UCLA OR Berkeley OR Dartmouth OR “Brown University” OR Princeton)

Here is an example result:

Sweet!

LinkedIn X-Ray Search

The other way you can search LinkedIn for people with specific GPA’s is to leverage an Internet search engine such as Google and perform an X-Ray search of LinkedIn profiles. While this approach comes with the intrinsic limitations of the inability to precisely control many of LinkedIn’s search fields/parameters (location by zip radius, current company, etc.), it does afford you the ability to leverage Google’s numrange search and you can view any public profile, whether they are in your network or not.

For example, here is a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn targeting profiles in the N.Y. metro area that mention java and 1 of a few common titles (developer, programmer, engineer), that also mention a GPA from 3.50 to 4.00.

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory java (engineer OR programmer OR developer) (GPA OR “G.P.A” OR “Grade Point Average”) 3.50..4.00 “greater new york city area”

Click here for the results.

As you can see from the results, using Google to X-Ray search LinkedIn and using Google’s numrange search functionality works quite well!

Conclusion

While some people will never have a need or the desire to search for potential candidates by GPA, others do and will – and it’s nice to know that you actually CAN reliably search by specific GPA ranges in LinkedIn with relatively few false positives. You or your organization may not be degree and/or GPA “snobs,” but there are more than a handful of Fortune 1000 companies who notoriously are. Plus, if you ever find yourself searching for recent grads and/or junior level folks, you could search for high GPA’s first to narrow your results down if you’re getting too many. The choice of if, how, and why you apply this LinkedIn GPA search is up to you.

Beware, however, that in attempting to target numbers – specifically those including punctuation such as decimals - in a search can produce false positives. For example, certain information technology applications/products have a 4.0 version. Additionally, the searches I created above do not take into account universities that have a scale that goes beyond 4.0 (I’ve seen some that go to 6.0).