The single best way to win the attention of any candidate to boost your placement rate

Ten months later your client opens the role she described, almost word for word. What you have on her is a name, a company and a title, which is what LinkedIn would have told any recruiter who had never met her, so your message reads like the other three she gets that week and she deletes all four.

Why do passive candidates stop answering recruiters?

Passive candidates usually ignore a recruiter’s message because it could have been sent to anyone with their title.The detail that would prove otherwise, the reason she would move in her own words, is typically heard at an event months before a role exists and lost within minutes of the conversation ending.

A passive candidate is someone good at a job she is not trying to leave, which is why she is among the most valuable people a recruiter can place and the hardest one to reach. You usually meet her months before there is a role for her, and the tools you pay for are built for the other end of that gap.

Each was designed around people who are already candidates for something, so none of them asks for the reason she would move.

Recruiters who review those tools on the App Store describe the same failure from the other side, which is that the app works well enough at a desk and stops helping once they are away from one. That is where you are in the 90 seconds after she tells you, still standing in the room with the next person already talking, and by the time you sit down what she said has been tidied into a category like “wants growth”, which could describe most of your pipeline.

What does one deleted message cost an agency recruiter?

On a $180,000 role, the message she deleted was worth between $36,000 and $45,000.An agency fee on a senior product role is often 20% to 25% of first-year salary. You had already paid for the expensive part of that fee: the ticket, the flights, the second evening, and the 15 minutes in which a passive candidate told a stranger what would make her move.

The part you lost would have cost nothing to keep, because it was a sentence.

The loss grows with every event, because you pay the same to meet everyone in the room. Work 8 events a year with 20 real conversations at each and you meet 160 people:

The handful who turn out to be right for a role that opens next spring are the ones whose reasons are likely to be gone by then.

What recruiting strategy works on passive candidates?

Lead with her reason for moving, in her words.Recruiters who get replies from passive candidates tend to open with something only they could know: the thing she said was missing from her work, sent back to her when a role matches it.

It works because it proves you were listening in the room rather than searching a database afterwards, and it answers her objection to moving before she has to raise it.

That strategy depends on two things a recruiter is usually missing by the time the role opens: a way of asking that draws the reason out of her when you have nothing to offer, and a habit that keeps her exact words through the 10 months in between.

The obvious question, whether she is open to new opportunities, gets the same polite answer from good candidates, which is why it produces nothing worth keeping.

How do you compare with the recruiters who place the most?

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