Finding Passives at a Blue Chip Consulting Organization

I asked Marc Couch, an executive search consultant at Integral Search and Selection, how he finds passives and this is how he responded.

I learned from my largest client the other day. They are a very large blue-chip consulting organisation who hire thousands each year, and as such have a mature, organised internal recruitment structure. Their sourcing breaks down as:

30% database recruitment (from their own database of candidates)
30% external recruiters (of which 5-10% retained search)
30% applications via their own website (which also supply their database)
10% job boards such as monster.com

Firstly, using only job boards is a lazy approach to recruitment that severely restricts your reach. And secondly, you need to use an intelligent mix of resources to source and attract the other candidates.

In this case, their brand alone gives them a good flow of individuals that they can store and tap into, and provide resources for individuals to register their interest in the company for future roles (thus giving them a database of warm passive candidates).

Their external recruiter suppliers are a very defined list of experienced individuals (they don't actually care about recruitment company brands, which is also quite interesting), and they use us for more than just giving us vacancies, but also for opinions on the market, mapping of competitors' specific functions etc.

The overriding message though is that you need to be both proactive and intelligent in your approach. There are literally thousands of resources out there and you can spend 80+ hours a day trawling through them all, so look at what you have first (be it a database, a brand, a name-gathering research function, a network), and then build out from there.