In this excerpt from the third edition of Hire With Your Head (John Wiley & Sons, 2007), Lou Adler explores how to find the best active and passive candidates by understanding the differences between different segments of candidates - and what top performers are really looking for.

Before you write another ad or speak to another candidate, it’s important to recognize that top people don’t use the same criteria when applying, considering, or accepting an offer. When considering whether to apply, top people want the ad to clearly explain the challenges and growth opportunities. During the interviewing process, they want to understand real job needs and gain a sense of the leadership skills of the hiring manager. When accepting a job offer, compensation is not the primary consideration. The opportunity and challenges inherent in the job are. In order of priority, the following are the top-five criteria that top people use when deciding to accept an offer:

1. The job match: The best people want to do work that challenges them and allows them to grow in areas they deem important.
2. The hiring manager: Top people want to work for leaders and mentors who can help them reach their goals. The quality of the manager directly relates to the quality of the people hired. As you discovered in Chapter 2, preparing a performance profile and understanding real job needs can help average managers become stronger.
3. The quality of the team: The team is a very important consideration for a top person. Meeting strong potential coworkers can overcome other concerns and minimize the chance of accepting a counteroffer. The best people get concerned when they meet potential coworkers who are weak interviewers or who don’t understand real job needs.
4. The company: A strong company with great employer branding certainly makes it easier to get someone initially interested, but these factors are less important when a top person makes the final decision to accept or not. Tying the actual job to some major company initiative is a great way to strengthen this link. This is called job branding. Even small or less known companies can do this.
5. The compensation package: As long as the compensation package is reasonable, most top people don’t consider it the number-one criteria. Only when the comp package is very high or very low does it become the primary consideration. Develop sourcing strategies and programs with these decision-making criteria in mind. The best people always have multiple opportunities. When evaluating new opportunities, the decision to accept is viewed as a long-term decision based largely on the criteria noted earlier. As a result, they take longer to decide and they want more information. They seek the advice of friends, family, and business associates. This is different for the average candidate who is interested more in the basic job content, the compensation package, and how long the commute is, not in the impact he or she can make. However, if you don’t differentiate your jobs, if the hiring manager is weak, and the overall interviewing experience is unprofessional, you’ll probably wind up competing on price. This is what always happens when a product or service is no different from its competitors. So if you want to find more top people, you need to differentiate your jobs and make sure that the top people you ultimately want to hire can find them.

Most advertising and sourcing programs are ineffective because they are targeting the wrong audience: those who need another job, not those who want a more challenging job or a long-term career. Top people will respond to compelling ads that are easy to find, especially if they focus more on opportunity rather than qualifications. Top people don’t get excited when reading a list of requirements. Not once have I ever heard a top person say the reason he or she was accepting an offer was to get more experience doing the same type of work. Yet, that’s what most job descriptions offer. Change this if you want to start hiring more top people.

Sourcing Starts by Understanding Why Top People Look
Design your sourcing programs around the needs of top people, not average people. A great web site with boring jobs won’t attract great people. A sophisticated applicant tracking system that causes top people to opt-out is counterproductive. A poorly administered employee referral program that targets everyone or overlooks high-potential candidates with a slightly different skill set is soon ignored. It takes a great job to hire a great person. Whether you’re hiring one person or one hundred, this fact must be advertised, discussed, understood, and paraded about by everyone involved in the hiring process, especially hiring managers. It needs to be built into every system, ad, process, letter, email, and form. Hiring the best is hard enough. Make sure you’re not precluding them from even applying in the first place.

To hire the best people, you must find them and attract their attention with the right offer. Most sourcing efforts ignore these two concepts.

The Sourcing Sweet Spot: Semi-Active and Semi-Passive Candidates
Forget the active versus passive candidate definition for a moment. Too many managers believe that active candidates are below average and all passive candidates are great. Realistically, there are some very good active candidates and some pretty bad passive candidates. By segmenting the market as shown in the following and developing more targeted sourcing programs, it’s relatively easy to find the best of both:

Segmenting Candidates Based on Need for a Job

• Very active: These are people who need a job and are aggressively looking. They tend to be less discriminating and focus on short-term compensation and security issues when considering a new job. This pool represents about 15 percent to 20 percent of the total employment market. They are either unemployed, or severely underemployed. The best are underrepresented in this pool. Traditional, boring advertising is sufficient to attract and hire this type of person.

• Semi-active: These are people who are fully employed but who want a better job. They look infrequently, generally on bad days or just to test the market. However, while they use job boards, they are more selective. Compelling advertising and systems designed to bring these people to the top of the list is a key part of hiring them. This pool is big, about 25 percent of the employment market and it’s growing.
• Semi-passive: These are people who want a better job and a better career. They are not actively looking, but they will accept a phone call to discuss future career opportunities. Who you call and what you say is a critical piece of hiring people in this group. The best approach is to prequalify all candidates before you call them; this way, you restrict your calls to only top people. This saves a great deal of time. The only way to prequalify someone is if he’s been referred by someone else. Being great at getting referrals is the secret of sourcing semi-passive candidates. The best people are fairly represented in this pool, but it takes more effort and time to find them.

• Very passive: These people don’t want another job. It takes too much effort and time to call and convince them to pursue your opportunity. The best people are fairly represented in this pool, but it’s not worth the effort if you can find an equally strong person using a less-intense, lower cost approach.

From Hire With Your Head, 3rd Edition, pages 69-73 John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 2007.