Researching candidates for our client

In this video, Jeff explains how we identify candidates for our clients and conduct research. We often say recruiting is not complicated. It’s not rocket science. It’s effort and it’s data. Research is where the data enters the equation.

Sadly, when most recruiters throw the word research around, it’s a fancy way of describing the act of writing a query on LinkedIn and sending a handful of badly written messages to the most obvious matches. What that really means is that they are looking for the most convenient people in the most convenient way for them, not for you. That misses most of the candidate pool. After all, only one third of the people in the US are on LinkedIn and over half of them have not updated their profile in over a year. Even those that are on LinkedIn often pay very little attention to it as a messaging platform. This means that 2/3 of the candidate pool is invisible using that superficial approach. The traditional superficial approach to research means your message does not even get to 2/3 of the potential candidates.

Our approach is very deep. We swim in data. It’s as simple as this – if Recruiter A talks to 1,000 people and Recruiter B talks to 50 people, it is more likely that Recruiter A will come up with the best candidate. The more people that we talk to, the better the candidate that comes to you. Our database is actually our second biggest expense. We lease industry specific employee databases and have access to company and alumnae directories. For some projects in rural areas, we actually use high school directories to identify people from that region who may be interested in returning.

We leave no stone unturned. When we go into our databases, our criteria is very broad. Who knows what may be missing on the profile that might be relevant to our client? Who knows what new skills the person has gained in the last year? We conduct in depth research to determine all of that that information.

A 500 person call list for a project is not unusual. Almost everyone on the list will get one call, and some will get two. If we need to speak to everyone on the call list, I promise you that we will do that. If we need to expand the call lost from 500 to 1,000 people, we do that too.

Frankly, we have been recruiting long enough to know how most recruiters think. The average recruiter uses technology to eliminate candidates and to make their job easier. Our philosophy is very different. We use technology to find as many potential candidates as possible. It is our job, not technology, to sift through that to find you the very best.

Recruiting is about people. We never forget that. We talk to as many people as necessary on your behalf. We take a professional approach and I will explain that in the next video.