I’m going to contend that with new tools now available, “true” passive candidate recruiting can maximize quality, reduce time to fill to weeks, and minimize cost per hire. Top-tier third-party recruiters are already using all of these techniques, so they’re proven and doable. What is surprising is why their corporate counterparts have yet to step up to the plate and do likewise. Now’s the time.

Using a high-tech, high-touch approach I believe it is now possible for a talented recruiter to build a slate of 3-4 top-notch passive candidates in as little as 72 hours from taking the assignment. As you’ll see, to pull it off, it requires the active engagement of hiring managers combined with reasonable sourcing skills, in combination with great recruiting, counseling, and closing skills.

In the first two parts of this series, the two-question performance-based interview was introduced. The first question involves asking candidates to describe some of their most significant business accomplishments in great detail. While it’s only one question, it is repeated multiple times to ensure the person can handle all of the critical performance aspects of the job, using a performance profile to define the work, rather than using a generic skills-based job description.

Recap: in part one of this series, the two-question performance-based interview was introduced. The first question involves asking candidates to describe some of their most significant business accomplishments in great detail.

Recruiters need to be able to quickly and accurately assess candidate competency. The obvious reason for this, though, is not the most important reason.

When I ask recruiters, hiring managers, and HR/recruiting leaders what’s their biggest hiring challenge they always say they don’t have enough top people to choose from. However, when you look below the hood at what’s really going on inside the company it’s clear they don’t have a sourcing problem, they have (pick one or more of the following based on what’s going on at your company):

This Forbes magazine article was pushed to me this week (January 27, 2012) by LinkedIn Today, highlighting why 46% of all new hires fail. The point of the article was to introduce a “radical” new approach to selection based on John Murphy’s new book, Hire for Attitude. The key point is that lack of proper attitude, not skills, is the primary contributor to weak performance. The author is only partially right.

The criteria top candidates use to accept an offer are not the same as the criteria they use to decide to engage in a discussion about a job. Understanding this difference is a fundamental key to improving your passive candidate recruiting effectiveness. It’s best to break these decision-making criteria into three broad categories to help distinguish the differences.

You can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow, nor the same recruiters, used for active candidates. As shown in the pie chart, 83% of fully-employed members on LinkedIn consider themselves passive when it comes to their job-hunting status. These are the Super Passives, Explorers, and Tiptoers. This breakdown is based on multiple surveys over two years (2010-2011) of LinkedIn’s fully-employed members with approximately 4,500 participants in each survey.