By Tom Sorensen
Managing Partner of Tom Sorensen | NPAworldwide Recruitment
Email: [email protected]
Can you recall the days when recruiting candidates was easier?
You placed an ad on JobsDB, LinkedIn, and other Online job boards, sorted through hundreds of applications, made a few calls, interviewed some candidates, and then made your choice.
Now fast forward to 2025.
When you want your competitor’s best man but don’t know how, when the Internet job boards do not generate qualified candidates, or when the supply runs dry – we call it: Welcome to the Club.
You are not alone.
Executives tell me this about their pain points
I don’t assume anything, but when speaking to top executives, I hear several serious challenges that delay or derail their progress.
Here are 8 of the most repeated challenges that are sure to stress anyone out.
We talk about late evenings at the office, a bit of work over the weekend, with little time to recharge and be with your family and friends.
- You have a massive personal workload with many deadlines.
- You just had a key person resign.
- You are experiencing high turnover within the team.
- You just won a massive piece of work from one of your clients.
- You are under pressure from head office to perform or deliver results.
- You have no real HR support, maybe no admin support, and are clearly not an expert in interviewing, recruiting, hiring, or onboarding.
- Your high season is just about to start, and the pressure is on.
- It’s salary review time, and you know your staff is underpaid and will be asking for raises and bonuses.
Finding candidates not looking for jobs is hard
People who are not looking for a job are called passive candidates.
- So passive candidates are fully employed candidates who are not looking to change jobs.
- They do not look at job boards for opportunities.
- They do not have an updated resume, and their LinkedIn profile is outdated with no contact details.
- Compare that to the other type of candidate, we call the active candidate. Simple.
LinkedIn reports that 70% of the global workforce consists of passive candidates,
Since passive candidates are so much more discriminating, you need to have a compelling job to offer (an employee value proposition).
Your job description must emphasize opportunities over requirements.
You need to be able to dip into a large network of people and then have a strong enough recruiter to cold call and convince these people of the merits of your job.
But the one-million-dollar question is, of course:
How and where do you get in touch with these passive people,
who represent most of the labour market?
High-performing executives are almost always employed
They seldom look for a job!
With less qualified active candidates, you need to get used to working with the so-called low-energy candidates (no resume, won’t call back).
I know that most hiring managers don’t bother pursuing this type of candidate, using this silly but common excuse:
“We don’t want to hire anyone not interested in our job.”
Honestly, giving up right there is the worst thing you can do.
Treat passive candidates as potential but reluctant buyers. So here is the deal.
The approach by true headhunters
I want to let you know that in Thailand, there is only a handful of what the recruitment industry defines as executive search firms (read: real headhunters).
These firms don’t only shop on the Internet. They hunt people 24/7.
They have fine-tuned the art of identifying, assessing, and hiring management and top executives.
They do this every day, week in and week out.
Cold-calling passive candidates is an art, and you only get one shot at getting it right.
