54% of poll respondents indicate they are employed and not actively looking for opportunities. A further 23% are employed but are actively looking.
In a prior blog post we highlighted poll results showing that employers think that passive candidates result in better employees. To build upon that information, we wanted to get a sense for the percentage of LinkedIn members that are passive candidates. To answer this question, we fielded a poll asking LinkedIn members to indicate if they were employed or unemployed and whether or not they were actively looking for a job. As of July 1st, 3,700 LinkedIn members took the poll.
Results show that at least 36% of LinkedIn members are employed, not actively looking, but still open to good job leads. With over 43 million total LinkedIn members, 36% represents a large number – over 15 million professionals. These are the most sought-after passive candidates, the ones that recruiters want to find and contact right before they even think of initiating their next job search.
Why? First, because recruiters want to identify the best performers before someone else hires them and, second, because they want to do that at a time when these passive candidates are likely to take their call or reply to an email, if the position is the right one of course.
The next best group of passive candidates are those that are employed, yet are not looking for a job at all – yielding an additional 18%. Combining these two groups of passive candidates brings the total to 54% – 23 million passive candidates.
The results from these two polls confirm that not only are passive candidates better employees, but that LinkedIn is the place to find them.
What do you think? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.
Tags: Recruiter
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I certainly agree that passive candidates are generally speaking a better quality of candidate. However, in these economic times there are plenty of strong active candidates who are in need of a new job through no fault of their own.
Linkedin markets itself as the number source to identify passive candidates (a claim I would endorse). However, some people using Linkedin to recruit want to be able to identify the 39% (according to your survey) of candidates who are actively looking as these candidates are likely to be more receptive to our jobs.
Is there any plans for candidates to be able to change their profile so that we can see if they are actively looking?
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I can’t argue with these stats.
We run a number of staff onboarding surveys for organisations of all sizes, and over the last 6 months LinkedIn has increasingly figured in the answer to the standard ‘how did you find out about your job?’ question. I guess the next step for us would be to further analyse this data to work out if there is a link between onboarding staff sourced from LinkedIn and whether the candidate was passive or actively looking. But overall these stats referenced above re the size of the passive candidate market via LinkedIn is not surprising at all (to me).
Paul Quinn
http://www.peoplepulse.com.au
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