Jim Stroud, Johnny Campbell + Chris Russell on Passive vs. Active Candidate Attraction

By Tony Restell

Jim Stroud, Johnny Campbell and Chris Russell all lined up to tackle the Passive vs. Active candidate attraction debate. Where should employers be investing their budgets - and what are the differences when it comes to attracting passive and active candidate types?

Well when I saw this SHRM video earlier today, I knew it had to be worth watching. Jim Stroud (Bernard Hodes Group), Johnny Campbell (Social Talent) and Chris Russell (Career Cloud) are three people whose updates I look out for - always packed with social recruiting nuggets! So the three of them tackling this topic was sure to be interesting. I wasn't disappointed and so share the video with you here below.
 

Just some of the things I came away better informed about include:
 

• Are Passive candidates actually better than Active candidates?
   
• Is there actually a difference between Active and Passive candidates, if the person’s skills and experience are similar?
   
• Recruiters are essentially looking for someone who 1) meets your requirements and 2) has the right motivations to want to work for you. Someone who is statistically more likely to want to work for you is arguably more worthwhile talking to – and that means exhausting credible active candidate sources like job boards before ploughing resources head first into researching and approaching the passive candidate pool.
   
• It’s important to invest in your employer brand and how your company is perceived, so that the right types of candidates – be they passive or active – are more likely to want to work with you.
   
• Being authentic is key too – when candidates start out at your company, does the day to day experience actually live up to what was promised during the courting stage? Get staff involved in showcasing the company and what it’s like to work there.
   
• Active candidates are most likely to be interested in what the specific job opening offers; passive candidates are most likely to be interested in the company and its culture, values, future prospects. So if 80% of the candidate audience is passive, you want to be investing in conveying these messages about what the company is like.

Video: Jim Stroud, Johnny Campbell + Chris Russell on Passive vs. Active Candidate Attraction
 

Hope you found the session as useful as I did - and let me conclude by pointing you in the direction of the twitter profiles for Jim Stroud (@jimstroud), Johnny Campbell (@socialtalent) and Chris Russell (@chrisrussell), all of whom are worth a follow if social recruiting is high on your agenda for the coming year.