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”