There is a persistent idea in recruitment that the best candidates are not looking for a job.
Passive candidates are often portrayed as more desirable because they are already employed, more successful because another organisation values them, more loyal because they are not actively searching and somehow lower risk because they are already doing a similar job somewhere else.
Active candidates can find themselves viewed rather differently, particularly if they are currently unemployed. Questions quickly arise. Why are they available? Why haven't they found something already? Why do they want to leave? Is there something we don't know?
After more than 25 years working across recruitment, executive search, RPO and corporate Talent Acquisition, I have never found employment status to be a particularly useful indicator of candidate quality. There are excellent people actively looking for work and excellent people who have no intention of moving until the right opportunity appears. There are also poor candidates in both groups. Someone's willingness to look for a job tells me remarkably little about how good they are at doing one.
When did availability become a measure of quality?
People become available for millions of reasons. They may have been made redundant following a restructuring or acquisition, seen their division close, completed a transformation or reached the natural end of an assignment. They might have relocated with their family, taken time away from work, decided to change industry or simply concluded that their current career is no longer taking them where they want to go.
Equally, someone can be employed, successful on paper and thoroughly miserable. They may dislike their boss, feel underpaid, have been passed over for promotion, dislike where they live, feel their career has stalled or simply want a change. Employment tells us that somebody has a job. It doesn't automatically tell us why they are there, how well they are performing or whether they want to stay.
Years ago, while recruiting in Geneva, I interviewed someone who loved his job, liked his colleagues and was genuinely happy with his employer. On paper, perhaps he was the perfect passive candidate. His personal circumstances, however, had changed. He had recently had a child and his wife had told him that he needed to find a better-paid position if they were going to maintain the lifestyle she expected. He was clearly upset discussing it with me.
Trying to decide whether he was active or passive would have told me virtually nothing. His motivation was personal, complicated and entirely human, and understanding it required a conversation rather than a classification.
That is true of almost anybody considering a career move. At senior levels particularly, changing jobs can affect considerably more than someone's next title or salary. It can mean moving a family to another country, changing children's schools, leaving deferred compensation behind, taking a significant career risk, changing industry or disrupting a spouse's career. Others may simply be bored, frustrated, underpaid or fed up with their boss. There doesn't have to be a grand strategic reason behind every career decision.
The useful question for a recruiter isn't whether somebody is active or passive. It is why they would move, what they are trying to achieve and whether this particular opportunity makes sense for them professionally and personally.
Why should wanting the job make someone less desirable?
One of the stranger consequences of the passive-candidate narrative is the subtle stigma it can create around people who are actively looking. There is an implication in some recruitment commentary that passive candidates make carefully considered career decisions, whereas active candidates may be desperate to escape a bad situation or simply need a job.
I don't recognise such a neat distinction from the real world. An active candidate may have thought very seriously about what they want next. They may have researched the market, considered their career trajectory and made a deliberate decision that they are ready for something different. That person can be considerably more motivated to complete a recruitment process than someone who was perfectly comfortable until a recruiter contacted them.
The supposedly passive candidate may initially be intrigued by an approach, enjoy meeting the leadership team and progress through several interviews, only to receive an offer and conclude that the grass isn't greener after all. Their employer might make a counteroffer, their family may decide against relocating, or the perceived risks of leaving may eventually outweigh the attraction of the new opportunity.
Neither scenario makes one candidate inherently better than the other. It simply demonstrates why understanding individual motivation matters considerably more than attaching a label to somebody at the beginning of a recruitment process.
This is also why I am sceptical when I see statistics presented as evidence that passive candidates are automatically more loyal, more productive or better long-term hires. Recruitment, like HR more broadly, loves a statistic. Add a percentage to a statement and it immediately appears more authoritative, but I have seen enough corporate surveys and internal presentations over the years to know how differently the same dataset can be presented depending on the conclusion somebody wants an audience to reach.
That doesn't make statistics worthless. It means they need context. What was the sample? How was "passive" defined? What was being compared? Were seniority, compensation, referrals, industry, geography and economic conditions considered? Does the evidence demonstrate that being passive caused the outcome, or merely that two things happened to correlate? Statistics can support an argument, but they shouldn't replace one.
Searching isn't recruiting
I suspect part of the modern attraction of passive candidates is that technology makes finding them feel highly targeted and efficient. A recruiter can search by company, title, location, sector, experience and keywords and quickly produce a neat population of people who appear to match a requirement.
There is nothing wrong with that. Good sourcing is an important part of recruitment, particularly in executive search. But sourcing and recruiting are not the same thing.
Whether I start with 100 people who have applied for a role or 100 people identified through a search, I still have essentially the same job to do. I need to understand their backgrounds, determine who is worth speaking with, engage them and establish what they have actually accomplished rather than simply where they have worked. I need to understand their motivation and aspirations and ultimately exercise judgement about whether they can succeed in the role, with the leadership team and within the organisation.
The fact that one person clicked "Apply" while another received my phone call doesn't change that responsibility.
Earlier in my career at Michael Page in London, we looked at jobs we had failed to fill that were subsequently filled by competitors. In around 90% of those cases, the successful candidate was already sitting in our own database. We hadn't lost because a competitor had somehow uncovered a hidden population of extraordinary passive candidates inaccessible to us. We already had access to the person who ultimately got the job.
The problem was that we hadn't identified and engaged them. Sometimes their information wasn't current, sometimes they hadn't appeared in a particular search and sometimes, among hundreds of names, somebody had simply been missed. In those days, the immediate explanation wasn't that there was a talent shortage or that we needed access to more passive candidates. The recruiter was expected to search properly, maintain their market knowledge, keep the database current and speak to people.
That lesson remains relevant despite the enormous amount of technology now available to recruiters. If the right person is already among the 500 people available to you, adding another 5,000 names achieves very little if nobody recognises them. What appears to be a talent shortage can sometimes be an attention problem, a process problem or simply a recruitment problem.
Are we creating some of the scarcity ourselves?
This is where the passive-candidate debate starts to overlap with the constant discussion about skills shortages. There absolutely can be shortages of particular technical capabilities in particular markets at particular moments, and some executive search mandates genuinely involve a very small addressable population. What I question is the much broader assumption that organisations simply cannot find talent.
Sometimes what an organisation really means is that it cannot find somebody with precisely the experience it wants, from precisely the industry it wants, in precisely the location it wants, at the compensation it wants and available within the timeframe it wants. Define the specification narrowly enough and eventually you create your own scarcity.
The response is often to search harder for passive candidates, particularly people already performing essentially the same job for a competitor. Yet that can overlook people with strong transferable skills who possess perhaps 70 or 80% of the required experience and could learn the rest. Adaptability, intelligence, motivation and the ability to learn are regularly described as important organisational capabilities, but recruitment processes don't always reflect that.
Companies frequently talk about agility, curiosity, development and career progression while simultaneously constructing job specifications that effectively say, "We want somebody who has already done exactly this job somewhere else." If every organisation insists on hiring somebody who already possesses every skill required for the next job, it raises an obvious question: who is developing the people everyone wants to hire in the future?
It is particularly relevant when businesses are recruiting into new technologies, products or emerging markets. Sometimes the ideal candidate with ten years of directly relevant experience simply cannot exist because the technology or business model hasn't existed for ten years. The sensible response is not necessarily to search harder for an imaginary perfect candidate, but to identify which capabilities genuinely need to exist on day one and which can realistically be learned.
Someone possessing 70% of what you need, with strong transferable skills, evidence of adaptability and genuine motivation to grow into the role, may prove an outstanding hire. Equally, they may not, but neither is the candidate with 100% of the keywords guaranteed to succeed. That uncertainty is precisely why recruitment requires interviews, assessment and ultimately human judgement.
Perhaps the labels are the problem
The preference for passive candidates doesn't come from one place. Unconscious bias can play a part, as can preconceived ideas about unemployment, perceptions of risk, familiarity with particular companies or backgrounds, a lack of understanding of transferable skills and pressure to fill a role quickly. Hiring managers may understandably feel safer selecting somebody who appears to have done exactly the same job before, while recruiters managing significant workloads may find tightly defined searches quicker and easier to execute.
But efficiency in searching should not be confused with quality in recruitment. The fundamental purpose of executive search and recruitment is remarkably straightforward: find the best person for the job. That person may currently be working for your biggest competitor and have no intention of leaving until somebody approaches them with a compelling opportunity. They may have applied to your advertisement yesterday, been made redundant six months ago, be sitting unnoticed in your ATS or come from an adjacent industry with transferable skills and enormous potential. Their career may not resemble the template imagined when the job description was written at all.
What matters is whether they can do the job, why they are considering it, whether the timing is right, whether the opportunity makes sense for their career and family, and whether they genuinely want to be there. Answering those questions requires a recruiter to find people, engage with them, understand them and exercise judgement. That, ultimately, is the job.
The distinction between active and passive candidates may be convenient terminology, but I don't believe it tells us anything meaningful about the quality of the person sitting in front of us.
Availability is not ability, employment status is not quality, and finding a name is not the same as recruiting a person.
Perhaps we need a little less categorisation, fewer preconceived ideas and a little more common sense.
#ExecutiveSearch #Recruitment #TalentAcquisition #Hiring #Leadership #TalentStrategy #FutureOfWork #CareerDevelopment
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