Hire With Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiringsm to Build Great Teams, Third Edition

Chapter 3. Talent-Centric Sourcing: Finding the Best Active and Passive Candidates

	If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language in which they think.
	--David Ogilvy

The Best People are Looking—Finding and Hiring Them is the Challenge

The Internet has dramatically increased workforce mobility. Job satisfaction appears to be at an all-time low. Turnover is rising. People change jobs on a whim. Counteroffers are more prevalent and more are being accepted. No wonder. To find another job nowadays, all a top person needs to do is Google a few keywords, a job title, and a city. When combined with a huge reduction in barriers to leaving a company (i.e., portable pension plans, reductions in health-care insurance, and fewer fringe benefits), employees are capable and willing to leave for minor infractions or slightly better offers. Turnover is no longer considered a character flaw. In this environment, a well-positioned ad or a timely phone call is sometimes all it takes to find a top performer. To take advantage of this trend, companies need to move away from a classified ad mentality of listing boring, hard-to-find jobs and, instead, adopt a consumer-marketing approach to advertising.

In this chapter, we describe how to find top people whether they are active or passive. First, it’s important to recognize that top performers don’t look for new opportunities the same way that average candidates look. They’re ...