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Candidate Identification

Candidate Identification Services

Long List of Spot-on Executive Candidates

If you want a Long List of spot-on passive executive profiles with biographies and contact information, Candidate Identification discovers candidates for executive search. Investigative Candidate Identification research — also known as Candidate Sourcing, Name Generation, or Name Gen — tackles important senior executive searches and senior technology searches for some of the most powerful and successful companies in the world. It outperforms traditional executive sourcing methods and ensures better results.

Diversity Candidate Identification

Diversity Candidate Identification ensures stellar diverse candidates are well represented on an executive search Long List. Because diverse candidates are, by definition, underrepresented at the senior executive level, traditional sourcing has not done enough to identify executives who are women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and People of Color. Greater research expertise is required. Investigative sourcing is ideally suited to diverse candidate discovery.

Candidate Calibration

What is Candidate Identification?

Candidate Sourcing is a form of executive search research that focuses on identifying executives to develop a long list of potential candidates for recruitment. Executive Candidate sourcing focuses almost exclusively on passive candidates, those who are not actively looking for a new job. To determine whether an executive is a potential candidate, the leader must be qualified and a top performer. Executives must have the required education as well as knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), and a track record of success.

Given the tight labor market, requirements are changing. In a fascinating article entitled Competing in the New Talent Market, its author McKinsey & Company Chief People Officer Katy George observes job requirements must shift from pedigree to potential and from “degrees to skills — not lowering entry barriers but changing them”. Some employers are dropping requirements for college degrees. They are creating real-time apprenticeships.

Develop a List of Target Companies

The candidate sourcing process usually starts with target companies — the employers where ideal candidates are working. The target companies usually include competitors, academy companies that cultivate great leadership talent, later-stage startups, and recent IPOs.

Conduct Target Company Research

As a best practice, candidate sourcers research the target companies that employ potential candidates. The research associate reviews SEC filings, executive team biographies, press releases, and other details to understand how the company is structured. The candidate sourcing determines the division, departments, and teams where ideal candidates are seated. The candidate sourcer then attempts to identify every viable candidate on those teams.

Identify and Profile Potential Candidates

Because candidate sourcers identify potential candidates and generate a list of people for recruiters to contact, the reseach is often referred to as Name Generation or Name Gen for short. But the research doesn’t stop at the executive’s name. Candidate sourcers attempt to determine the Title and Location of the executive. They develop and verify contact information, preferably a personal Phone and Email address. They build out career details, determining the responsibilities of the executive, the size of the team, and the size of the P&L. Some candidate sourcers write biographies, highlighting details pertinent to the role to which executives are being recruited. If the sourcers are Talent Mapping, they also determine who is the executive’s Direct Superior.

Develop the Long List of Potential Candidates

Candidate sourcing usually is aimed at generating a Long List of potential candidates for a specific executive search. To do that, the sourcers methodically search for prospective candidates at every target company. Usually, the Long List starts with about 40 prospects, yet it can grow to a couple hundred people during an executive search, including industry sources providing referrals.

Calibrate Candidates Where Possible

Candidate sourcing also involves candidate calibration when possible. Researchers capture information that shed like on how the performance of an executive. Top-performer markers include academic achievements, sports achievements, getting industry awards and recognition, beating sales quotas, producing intellectual property (patents), public speaking and news coverage, and directly contributing to growing revenue and market share.

The Advantages of Investigative Candidate Identification

You Discover Dream Candidates Others Miss

Traditional sourcing on LinkedIn doesn’t tell you whether you’ve found virtually every viable candidate at a company. And that’s a problem. That’s how sourcers miss candidates who very well may be your next hire. However, investigative sourcers set a strategy to answer that question. Understanding whether a researcher has found every viable candidate at a target company is essential. The approach consistently uncovers dream candidates that traditional search firms and recruitment research firms fail to identify.

LinkedIn Is Not Designed for Candidate Sourcing

LinkedIn is not designed for executive recruiting. It is a social network for business people that tacked on recruiting to monetize its business model. It remains a social networkThat structural issue makes it hard to filter the social network’s crowdsourced member profiles for top executives. The data quality is uneven. The filters are crude. Far too many unqualified candidates get in the way of the ones you want. As a result, sourcing teams regularly miss A-players — the kind you need for senior leadership roles.

Investigative Sourcers Reach Beyond

Investigative candidate sourcers do a better job of sourcing on LinkedIn by approaching the research more strategically. They develop the structure that LinkedIn information lacks. The method uncovers dream candidates others miss on the social network. Moreover, they reach beyond LinkedIn to identify dream candidates that are not discoverable on the social network. In other words, they have greater reach. While investigative sourcers use LinkedIn — who can resist a database of more than 850 million names? — they consistently uncover the best-of-the-best talent by reaching beyond the social network.

You Close More Searches with Amazing Hires

The benefit of investigative sourcing is palpable. It makes searches smart, so you close searches faster with game-chaging hires. You avoid painful searches that drag on far too long. Companies come to us when executive search firms failed to deliver the right executive. Inevitably, we discover perfect hires that were simply overlooked. The problem isn’t too little information but rather too much information about candidates. Traditional retained search firms, in-house reruiting teams, and candidate sourcing teams lack the investigative data expertise to separate the signal (the ideal candidate) from the noise (everyone else).

Smart Sourcing. Genius Partner.

Intellerati offers candidate sourcing including candidate identification, candidate development, and diversity recruitment research to enhance candidate Long Lists. Our candidate sourcing research tackles important senior executive searches and senior technology searches. We excel at delivering game-changing hires. To learn more about the advantages of Intellerati, check out our Executive Recruiting Research Case Studies.

Learn More About Intellerati

Intellerati is a national executive search research practice that provides candidate sourcing for locations across the United States. We offer recruitment research services for a variety of functions and industries, including technology, life sciences, and financial services. In addition to our unbundled executive search services, Intellerati offers specialized diversity recruiting researchtalent mapping, and organizational charts.

Got questions? Let’s talk.

If you’d like to explore possible ways to work together, let’s talk. We understand that no recruitment research firm is the right firm for every engagement every time. But, regardless, we make it a practice to listen and to try to help.