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Today unemployment, in the executive ranks, is at an all time low. Employees are not looking at job boards and passive emails are not going to make candidates move. We have just finished a high level search for an Architectural Engineering firm and made presentations to over 600 candidates to complete the search. The reason that hiring authorities and executive recruiters are taking so long to complete searches today, is that they are using automated tools (Linkedin) to source and communicate (email) with candidates. In times like these, it is important to understand the client or company’s value proposition and actually call potential candidates on the phone, presenting opportunities, asking lots of questions and fending objections. This was actually the reciting model 35 years ago, when fax machines were just getting popular. Today digital methods are not working and advertising is overwhelming with so much Internet traffic. Hence, recruiters and hiring authorities have to deploy a more personal and engaging recruitment process today, to larger passive candidate pools.

There are many online job sites hosting millions of resumes. Monster and Careerbuilder have over 100 million resumes and there are more than 100 thousand other sites on the Internet, including social sites such as Facebook and Linkedin, as well as scrapers like SimplyHired and Indeed and there will probably be another one before I post this. The problem with these sites is they only address passive candidates. The majority of the best candidates don’t post their resumes online. They are either not motivated to look for another job or they don’t want their employer to see them advertising their background to the whole world. It’s been said, by many executive recruiters, that only 10% of the total population of qualified candidates, for any specific assignment, are ever found on these websites.

Mark Hovind, the late CEO of nationally acclaimed JobBait,  who assisted highly compensated executives in transition, said that most of his clientele didn’t want their resumes floating around the Internet because they didn’t want to look over exposed or desperate. Candidate sourcing and development organizations such as Lakeview Research can address 90-95% of the qualified population quickly and free up recruiters and corporate hiring authorities to remain focused on communicating with candidates and managing the hiring process from initial offer to onboarding.

The unemployment rate, depending on economic times, is somewhere between 4 and 10%, but the unemployment rate for college educated and highly skilled employees is half of that. Actually, only about a quarter of the American work force even has a college degree, never mind highly sought after skills. The fact is that only 2% of this educated and skilled population actively searches for a new opportunity while currently employed. That means that over 90% of the population, for any given search, is passive. This is the population that candidate-sourcing firms, such as Lakeview Research accesses. When this population is aggressively addressed, you can expect a less competitive and better response to your opportunity.

Staffing research firms such as Lakeview Research charge by the hour, or a flat fee and not by hire and can generally turnaround research in less than 72 hours. They can also conduct candidate sourcing, candidate profiling and candidate pre-screening, making the search process even more efficient.

It’s still a widely agreed upon adage with recruiters that it takes somewhere between 60 and 120 well-researched candidates to produce 6-12 interested candidates, 3-6 interviews and a placement. If you are a recruiter, you might find it more profitable to use your phone time to develop clients and as an internal hiring authority, guiding the talent acquisition process. For internal hiring authorities, outsourcing name generation and candidate development is almost essential as they can’t make excessive phone calls to competitor companies or they may be perceived as poaching or intruding on their competition, resulting in unwanted recourse.

The incoming generation of workers is predicted to be the most diverse in history, while at the same time being the least educated. The challenge, to attract and acquire human capital, will increase and so will the need for proactive candidate development firms, such as Lakeview Research.