The Passive Candidate

I stumbled across an interesting article today in Jim Stroud’s The Recruiter’s Lounge. Curiously, to me at least, is that I found this article through Twitter and then tracked down the author through Linked In. Yes I twit and tweet … do you?

Anyway, Karen Mattonen is a recruiter who was ranting (her word not mine) about the myth of the passive candidate. While obviously written for the recruiter audience, I believe her points can be enlightening to job search candidates and my favorite prospects … those senior finance executives who are employed but positioning themselves to learn about new opportunities.

My readers may remember that upon returning from the Kennedy Conference last October, I commented on the overriding theme … these internal recruiters were all in search of the Passive Candidate.

So Karen’s article provided some additional fodder for a topic I find near and dear. My favorite excerpt from her article follows:

“As a TPR [third party recruiter], the clients I represent want me to locate the passive candidate, maybe they have searched the boards and did not find the talent for the position, the position is at a senior level, and those candidates generally may not be found on the boards, maybe the position being filled could be compared to finding a needle in a haystack…."

Wouldn’t you like to have a recruiter relationship with someone like Karen? Like all other networking relationships, it pays to build them before you need them.