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.

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. Diversity sourcing requires greater research expertise. Investigative sourcing is ideally suited for diverse candidate discovery.

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 right education, knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), as well as 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 that 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 starts with target companies — the employers where ideal candidates are working. 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. Research associates review SEC filings, executive biographies, press releases, and articles. They examine the structure of the target company — 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

Candidate sourcers generate lists of potential candidates for recruiters to contact. That is why the research is 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 each candidate’s career details, determining the job responsibilities, team size, and the P&L. Some candidate sourcers write biographies, highlighting pertinent information. If the sourcers are building talent mapping org charts, they even determine the executive’s direct superior.

Develop the Long List of Potential Candidates

Candidate sourcing focuses on developing a Long List of potential candidates for a specific executive search. Often, the initial Long List of 40 prospects can grow to more than a 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 sheds light on an executive’s performance. Top-performer markers include academic achievements, sports achievements, industry awards and recognition, beating sales quotas, producing intellectual property (patents), public speaking, news coverage, and increasing 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. That is how executive searches fail.

However, investigative sourcers research the structure of target companies to locate the teams where ideal candidates are seated. The approach uncovers dream candidates that search firms

LinkedIn Has a Candidate Sourcing Problem

LinkedIn remains a social network for business professionals. It started offering premium licenses and services to recruiters to monetize its business model. That sets up a structural problem: crowdsourced data generated by members makes candidate sourcing harder than it needs to be. When sourcers struggle, it delays candidate development and slows time-to-hire.

LinkedIn members create profiles filled with uneven data. Moreover, the search filters are unreliable. Consequently, far too many unqualified candidates get in the way of the ones you are targeting. As a result, sourcing teams regularly miss A-players — the very leaders you should target for senior executive roles.

Investigative Sourcers Reach Beyond LinkedIn

Of course, expert, investigative candidate sourcers use LinkedIn — who can resist a database of more than 1.1 billion names? But they approach LinkedIn research more strategically. They develop the structure that LinkedIn information lacks. The method uncovers ideal candidates that traditional sourcers overlook. Sifting through a billion profiles is exhausting for most talent acquisition and sourcing teams. Moreover, investigative sourcers reach beyond LinkedIn to target candidates who are not discoverable on the social network. In other words, expert sourcers have greater reach.

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-changing hires. You avoid painful searches that drag on far too long. Often, companies come to us when executive search firms or internal executive recruiting teams fail to deliver the right executive. The problem isn’t too little information but rather too many candidate profiles. Traditional retained search firms, in-house recruiting teams, and candidate sourcing teams lack the expertise to separate the signal (the ideal candidate) from the noise (everyone else). Moreover, while it is a start, LinkedIn is not the best place to recruit senior executives.

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.