Recruiting Passive Candidates – Lessons in Strategic Sourcing from LinkedIn Talent Connect Europe 2012

I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2012 LinkedIn Talent Connect conference hosted in London.  In addition to some great food, stacks of sweets, music, and all round entertainment, I also had the opportunity to network with recruiters from all over Europe and listen to some great presentations covering topics from the latest LinkedIn innovations to employer branding, passive candidate recruitment and what Recruitment 5.0 might look like.

Of the many presentations I attended there was one which particularly stood out for me that demonstrated great examples of forward thinking, commercially focused strategic sourcing models.

The presentation was called “Passive Candidate Recruiting Success with Betfair & Centrica” and was presented by Rachel Riddlington – Research & Sourcing consultant from Betfair, and James Dowling – Group Executive Talent Manager at Centrica.

Betfair – Moving to a Strategic Sourcing Recruitment Function

Betfair is one of the world’s largest international online sports betting providers with three million registered customers around the world.

With 80% of candidates estimated to be passive, combined with the need to recruit within difficult niche markets such as IT Security, Betfair identified that to ensure they could recruit the best talent available, they needed to evolve their in-house recruitment model from a reactive one, to a strategic sourcing one.

In terms of what that model looks like visually, consider the diagram below (this is based on my memory and some hastily scribbled notes).

click image to enlarge

The recruitment of passive candidates has been made central to their in-house recruitment structure.  Talent Acquisition Managers have a business partner role while the Research & Sourcing Team are made up of highly skilled sourcers and recruiters responsible for end to end recruitment. The Executive Search team is broken down into two groups, Project Work such as succession planning, and Executive Search, who actively map talent at competitor organisations.  This type of structure and focus on passive candidates accounts for the recruitment of approximately 70% of their roles.  That’s a huge amount of passive talent!

In terms of the actual day to day recruiting activities and sources of hires, the team get involved with a variety of tasks including:

1. Market mapping across skill sets
2. Creating talent pools & pipelines
3. Head Hunting
4. Hosting Events
5. Referrals
6. Special Ops (reacting quickly to talent intelligence)
7. External advertising

External advertising such as the use of job boards is one of the few activities pulling in active candidates, and Rachel mentioned that it’s still a useful medium for some roles, although of course not central to the overall recruiting strategy.

Examples of Strategic Sourcing

Within the difficult to fill areas, Betfair host their own events such as drinks evenings and one to one coffees with the talent they have identified.  This further helps to build relationships with candidates who might not be actively looking for jobs.

I’ve personally referred to one of their methods as ‘Special Ops’, in reference to how they execute opportunistic recruitment projects in reaction to specific intelligence in the market.  When they learned that a competitor was relocating/closing a London office, they knew that some great talent might not want to relocate and pro-actively approached these candidates.

In terms of building pipelines and talent pools, they do this within various niche skill sets where they identify and approach candidates.  To improve the monitoring and communication with candidates they have begun using LinkedIn Pipeline as a CRM tool.

Centrica – Connecting your business and resourcing plans

James Dowling from Centrica also provided some useful insights into their strategic resourcing function. Centrica creates 3 year resourcing plans as per the following simple steps (I say simple, there’s obviously a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes):

1. Connect the future business plan with resourcing needs
2. Build a talent intelligence plan
3. Translate research into recruitment action

Although it seems an obvious and logical step to plan a resourcing strategy around future business plans, I would be interested to know what percentage of companies actually do this? Quite a low amount I anticipate.  Such a strategy requires a recruitment team structure that ensures a close relationship between the recruiting function and the business, so that the resourcing plan can be frequently updated to reflect fresh business intelligence.

Strategic Sourcing Within Renewable Energy

Recruiting within the niche Wind Farm area of the renewable energy sector had historically provided Centrica with significant challenges.  To deal with this they studied their business plan to identify future dates that they were due to be engaged in new wind farm projects.   Ahead of time they mapped out internationally the talent of Wind Energy professionals amongst their competitors.  Armed with this knowledge they could then go to market and  approach relevant candidates to ensure the right staff were in place in time to deliver on the business’s wind farm projects.

James indicated this proactive sourcing approach has delivered great results, successfully alleviating any potential ‘bottle necks in the supply chain’ relating to Wind Energy projects.

 Saving £163,000 on a single hire, the power of talent mapping.

Another achievement James was particularly proud of (with good reason) as a result of their strategic resourcing function, was an example relating to an Executive hire.  For a specific very senior executive position it was apparent they may need to cast their net further afield from the energy sector.  They therefore built talent maps external to their sector, that could potentially identify the right candidate.

Having identified the right person(s) who indeed happened to be operating outside of the energy sector, the sensitivity of the role still dictated that they needed to use a third party to establish contact and make an initial approach.  Ultimately they successfully recruited the candidate they had identified at an approximate cost of £12,000.  Compare this against the estimated £163,000 that the use of a third party head hunter was expected to cost for facilitating the whole process, and you can see why James was so happy.

Conclusion

These were just a couple of examples of how two companies operating in very different sectors have used commercially driven strategic sourcing models to consistently identify and recruit passive talent.  At the end of the presentation both Rachel and James were asked what their top tips would be for other recruiters embarking on such strategies. They mentioned the below respectively:

“Really understand your candidate” & “Practice what you preach, hire the best recruiters and don’t compromise”

 

LinkedIn Job Listings – Some Useful Insights (maybe….)

Recently, I decided to add to my team and hire a senior business development manager into the mix.  As is always the case with most businesses, I wanted a great candidate who could start yesterday.  I took a dual approach; firstly I leveraged my own network via referrals and my personal social media presence.  Secondly I distributed the vacancy across a number of job boards combining niche sales sites, popular generalist boards, LinkedIn, and the Bullhorn Reach platform.

In this instance, the candidate who eventually got the job ended up coming from my own LinkedIn network.  They had simply noticed one of my LinkedIn status updates regarding the new position and got in touch.

After benchmarking the performance of the various platforms used for this recruitment campaign, I thought I’d share some insight  from my own experience into the performance of LinkedIn job listings.  When I refer to LinkedIn job listings, I’m talking about using the actual job posting functionality which tags the job to your LinkedIn company careers page as opposed to a status update, or posting a careers discussion within a group.  Also it’s worth noting, I’ve compiled this data from a reporting element of the LinkedIn recruiter suite which is still in Beta.

With standard job listings, most will agree that you are predominantly targeting active candidates.  What I find interesting about LinkedIn job listings however, is how passive candidates appear to be discovering them.

Take my BD job for example.  It received 140 apply clicks from 2838 views, however only 12% of the people viewing the job actually originated from active job searching within LinkedIn.  46% of views originated from the job being suggested to users based on their profiles and LinkedIn’s matching algorithm (so not necessarily active candidates).  The remaining 42% of views originated from social sharing, Google, Linkedin groups etc (I suspect part of the traffic from this 42% involves aggregator sites delivering active job seekers).  Either way there is good reason to believe that a decent number of passive candidates discovered my job.

Example 1 – BD Manager – London

After crunching some numbers on several other roles based not just in the UK, but elsewhere in Europe, a similar pattern emerges with the vast majority of the roles not being found via active searching.

Example 2 – Project Manager (Prince 2 Qualified) – London 

This particular project manager position benefited from a higher sharing rate than normal (it was forwarded 15 times and posted within the LinkedIn network an additional 15 times) but again the amount of views originating from active job searching appears to be quite low, only 20%, compared to 35% that had the job suggested to them.

Example 3 – HR Business Partner – London

This HR vacancy generated one of the highest volumes of active job seekers, although again over 6o% of the views originated elsewhere.

Looking at Holland & Belgium it was a similar story, indicating that a large proportion of the candidates viewing the roles were not actively searching for jobs.

Example 4 – Senior Project Manager – Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Example 5 – Online Marketing Specialist, Diegem, Belgium

These are just a small number of examples I’ve pulled out based on several hundred listings.  In each case though the pattern is similar with active job searching accounting for somewhere between 20-40% of overall job views.

In summary, based on my usage of the LinkedIn platform, there are more effective and engaging LinkedIn recruitment tactics for hiring that elusive passive candidate, however as an element in a wider strategy I’ve found the use of LinkedIn job listings  to be consistently useful, and the data insightful.

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK