Sure, there are millions of job seekers in the marketplace right now. Obviously, those people don’t have to be recruited for an open position as much as, say, a passive candidate who really isn’t looking for a new opportunity.
However, as any recruiter will tell you, many companies are looking for those hard-to-find, passive candidates with the superstar skill set and potential to contribute considerably to the organization’s bottom line.
Finding those candidates is just the first step in the process. Successfully recruiting passive candidates is where the real work is done. Recruiters must sell the candidate on the opportunity if they want to more fully satisfy their client’s needs.
But exactly how easy—or difficult—is it to recruit those types of candidates? Well, we conducted a poll of Top Echelon Network recruiters to find out the answer to that question:
Overall, how easy or difficult is it right now to recruit qualified, passive candidates?
Results:
We presented a choice of six answers, which are listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters that chose each one:
- Very easy—1.1%
- Somewhat easy—7.4%
- Neither easy nor difficult—21.1%
- Somewhat difficult—48.4%
- Very difficult—22.1%
Analysis:
As you can see, nearly half of recruiters (48.4%) indicated that recruiting passive candidates is “somewhat difficult,” and another 21.1% stated that it’s “very difficult.”
Put those answers together, and 69.5% of recruiters believe that recruiting such candidates is difficult to some degree. On the flip side of the coin, 7.4% indicated that recruiting passive candidates is “somewhat easy.” As for “very easy”? Hardly anybody believes that’s the case right now at 1.1%.
So it’s not even close: recruiting qualified, passive candidates is difficult!
Conclusion:
This is basically a good news-bad news situation.
The good news: companies are hiring. In fact, not only are companies hiring, but they are more than willing to use recruiters in order to find the candidates they need.
The bad news: qualified, passive candidates are not only difficult to find (which is one of the reasons that companies are willing to use recruiters), but they’re also difficult to recruit!
This means there are plenty of job orders that recruiters can work. So . . . what situation would recruiters rather face?
- A lack of job orders
- A lack of qualified candidates
Sure, it might be difficult to fill the order. But you HAVE the order. The candidate is out there . . . somewhere. You just have to find them.
And recruit them.