Added Value of Hiring a Search Firm: Pursuing Passive Candidates
In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review, Anthony K. Tjan, CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball, explains that the best candidates are usually the ones that have options–they are the candidates that you have to pursue and convince to leave their current companies. The key to landing these candidates is to build a two-way dialogue in the interview. Not only do you have to determine what the candidate will bring to your company, but you have to explain what your company will bring to the candidate. Tjan says that the most important question you should answer when looking to make a hire, is why the candidate would choose your offer over another.
Tjan’s “most important question” stresses the necessity of employers to stand out from their competition. Fred Clayton, CEO of Berkhemer Clayton, believes that “most employers spend far more time evaluating than recruiting candidates and should heed his very good advice to devote the necessary time and be calculated when attempting to attract “A” players because they do, in fact, have alternatives–so, yours had better stand out!” As a company, you need to keep in mind that the best talent will probably have multiple job opportunities in addition to yours. In fact, most of the time these talented candidates are not even looking for a job.
Ben Lambert, Vice President of Berkhemer Clayton, explains, “The best candidates tend to be happily employed, successful in their jobs, and not actively looking to leave. They often need to be enticed to leave their current roles and organizations. This is the main difference between the active and passive candidate pool…the best candidates always need more convincing.” Both Fred and Ben stress the importance of showing potential candidates what your company would bring them.
While an undeniably important question, asking yourself if a candidate would choose your company may not be “the most” important question in the entire interview process. Sai Pradhan explains that an interview is meant to “ascertain the possibility,” probability of yield, as Tjan calls it, “of matching the job seeker with the job at hand,” and only after being “convinced that the candidate is a match for the employer” does it matter if the candidate would choose your company. If you don’t have a sense already, the interview should be when you decide if the candidate is a good match for your company and if your company is a good match for the candidate.
Interviews should feature two-way dialogue. Without this dialogue it is impossible to gauge if the candidate and your company would be a symbiotic match. The discourse can break, or amplify, previous opinions you had about a candidate–and this is vital. According to Fred Clayton, a “hiring executive may have a bias in favor of a candidate based on resume and reputation before she /he even walks through the door; and, if the person looks the part, speaks well, and possesses that top-drawer spark, they quickly conclude that this is “the One” when, in fact, it might very well not be.”
An honest discourse between candidate and company is really the only way to see through a candidate that may not be the perfect fit. Tjan’s “most important question” is certainly an important question to ask yourself when hiring top talent, but it is more important to ask yourself if you and the candidate would be a good fit for each other.
