How much would you pay for "a" passive candidate?

Hi,

It's hard to find passive candidates now. I often ask my network to help me find the right candidates. And also list on some job search board.

Today, all job boards charge by month and it's expensive. If a job site claim to charge by performance, how much can you accept? Of course, it's diferent for diferent level. Can you give me some direction? Thanks.

Here is my thought:
1. $400: the same as job listing per month on Monster.
2. same as referral bonus.
3. other: please let me know.

-Jack
http://jobirn.com

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Weidner on August 2, 2008 at 10:08pm

Paul,
Though many companies are looking for the bottom line of a hired candidate. Many others just want to make sure they are making the offer to the "best" candidate available. Many of our candidates come in 2nd place to the candidate our client ultimately hires and I hear time and time again that they would not have made a final decision on that candidate unless they had seen the other candidates to benchmark the "best" candidate against.

Other clients are actually not looking to make a hire but are looking for market intelligence by intervewing candidates from their competitors. It's sneaky but it works. That market intelligence can be worth far more than any amount contributed to the bottom line from a hire. Don't believe me ask Apple or Google. They are notorious for being "need to know" product environments. Only the "top" people know the final details of a product release date, feature specs or pricing etc. Even the recruiters placing candiates in those product engineering groups do not know the details of what they are truely looking for and are only giving "generic" job descriptions.

Less prevalent is when a client scraps the development of an entire IT system (4 million in development costs saved) because after weeks of searching for a specific type of DB Administrator for an obscure database and realizing there were only a select few in the country that wanted to be an Administrator for it. They obtained this information by interviewing candidates that had the experience. So after identifying and developing 7 qualified candidates and realizing there was only about 100 potential candidates in the entire US the company decided to go with a more popular database, Oracle.

Jeff Weidner