Passive Candidate Recruiting Best Practices for CRE in 2025

January 6, 2025 Read Time: 8 min

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How to Find and Recruit Passive Job Candidates in CRE in 2025

Filling an empty role within an organization is time- and resource-consuming with weeks, sometimes months, spent combing through resumes, comparing qualifications, and interviewing applicants. There is an alternative to the classic job application process: Passive recruiting strategies.

A passive recruiting strategy is about leveraging your company’s network to find a candidate that’s well suited for the role — even if that candidate hasn’t applied to the position. In this strategy, your firm reaches out to qualified candidates to offer them an interview for a position. This strategy acknowledges that 70% of the global workforce consists of passive talent not actively seeking jobs, according to Zappyhire’s recruitment trends for 2024. You may also be surprised to hear that Zappyhire found that 94% of surveyed passive talent expressed readiness to accept job offers when directly contacted.

This post will help you craft a more effective recruitment strategy through passive recruiting. This can be a delicate process, as candidates may already be employed and don’t immediately see the benefits of working at your firm. However, we’ll show you have passive candidate recruiting can potentially be a new strategy for hiring top talent at your firm.

What Are Passive Job Candidates?

Traditional current recruitment strategies involve creating a job posting on your website and then linking that post to recruitment sites like Indeed.com, LinkedIn Jobs, Glassdoor, and SelectLeaders. This results in candidates sending in applications that include resumes, cover letters, and other information about their experiences. Because these applicants are actively pursuing the position, they’re considered active job candidates.

Passive candidate recruitment meaning: The practice of identifying and engaging qualified individuals who are not actively seeking jobs but may be open to opportunities, given the right offer.

Passive job candidates aren’t actively pursuing a position at your, or any, company. They differ from active job candidates in a few key ways:

They aren’t active on job boards and aren’t applying for positions.
Passive candidates are currently employed.
They exist within your network — your firm has to come to them.
You may have to do some persuading — passive job candidates won’t likely be immediately interested in a job.

An example of a passive recruitment process is when a CRE investment firm needs to fill a senior position. Instead of interviewing candidates, the hiring manager or recruiter at the firm reaches out through their network to find candidates with experience. The hiring manager may find a candidate who works in a completely different industry, not in a senior role, for example. However, their experience matches up with what the CRE firm is looking for, so the hiring manager reaches out directly to the candidate to talk about a potential job opportunity.

Passive recruiting vs poaching: What’s the difference?

Employee poaching is when a firm’s competitor reaches out to employees to try to entice them to leave their current position to work at the competitor’s company. Employers in some industries will require their employees to sign non-compete clauses to restrict their ability to work at a competing firm for a certain period.

To avoid employee poaching, we recommend searching for passive candidates outside of your direct competitors. If a candidate leaves a position at a direct competitor, you can also keep an eye on them for a couple of years or so to offer them a position once the non-compete clause wears off.

Passive candidates are often highly desirable because they have proven experience related to what a firm is searching for. It may be easier to vet passive candidates and assume that they’ll do great work. But the reality is, it’s not always simple to recruit a passive candidate. How do you entice someone away from a company where they have security and job-satisfaction?

How To Source Passive Job Seekers

Sourcing a passive jobseeker is about targeted, informed research. Passive recruitment is, after all, intended to be more efficient than traditional recruiting. To this end, the Academy to Innovate HR recommends crafting a candidate persona that includes some of the most desirable skills and characteristics of a candidate. This will guide your search for a passive candidate.

During the traditional recruitment process, your hiring manager may draft a job posting around the necessary qualifications for a candidate. This could include:

Hard skills
Soft skills
Experience in specific industries
Education
Certifications

These qualifications should certainly be included in the persona that you create. But to find an even more desirable candidate, and narrow your pool, you should include information about their demographics, geographic location, online presence, and anything else that would make them a better fit for the position.

Katie Hart, the associate director of recruiting at SelectLeaders and Bisnow, suggests crafting employee value propositions (EVP) that showcase your organization’s identity, culture, and unique offerings.

“Passive candidates … are more likely to be drawn to organizations that align closely with their professional aspirations and personal values,” Katie said. “[They] are unlikely to leave their current role for an opportunity that provides fewer benefits or growth prospects.”

With this in mind, how do you find the candidates that match these personas?

Your professional network and social media connections are always a good first step.

Who is following your company on LinkedIn?
Who has the qualifications in your network?
Who is qualified in other employees’ networks?
Are there candidates who applied to your firm in the past that may be qualified?
Who have you talked to at networking events and conferences?

Best Tool for Sourcing Passive Candidates

SelectLeaders’ target database can expand your pool of potential applicants.

“We’re all about helping you connect with those hard-to-reach passive candidates!” said Brittany Acosta, senior corporate recruiter for SelectLeaders and Bisnow.

SelectLeaders is all about helping you connect with hard-to-reach passive candidates. Many professionals use SelectLeaders to stay updated on the industry, even if they’re not actively looking for a new job.

“Plus, our platform helps showcase your company in a way that gets them interested,” Brittany said.

With our advanced search tools and targeted campaigns, CRE companies can find and reach out to these passive candidates who might be waiting for the right opportunity to come along. The executive search team specializes in sourcing, engaging, and building trust with passive candidates.

How to Contact Passive Candidates

Perhaps the most difficult step is tactfully reaching out to a passive candidate with information about the job opportunity. A candidate who’s already employed somewhere isn’t likely to respond well to a sudden job offer. They may be suspicious or dissuaded by aggressive recruitment schemes.

To this end, we generally recommend a softer approach to candidates who haven’t applied to your firm in the past.

When you reach out, don’t immediately offer them a new position. It’s OK if they’re aware you’re a hiring manager or recruiter — you don’t want to deceive them. But, focus on understanding them and their career goals and providing them with information about your firm to get them interested in working with you.

As always, the more personalized, the better the response is likely to be. If you have the time to craft a personalized introduction method and personally follow up with them, they’re far more likely to be interested in your firm.

Of course, this level of personalization is for top applicants who perfectly fit your applicant profile. You can find these top applicants by sending out more generic marketing emails and messages to applicants within your ATS or applicants found within a database. A passive candidate engaging with your marketing emails is a sign that they’re interested in your company.

Should You? Pros and Cons of Passive Sourcing

Advantages of passive recruitment

Fewer applicants to sort through
Applicants are less competitive — they aren’t actively seeking positions
Passive candidates have better experience on average
Not as much urgency to get hired — candidates can work on longer timetables
Less time spent interviewing dozens of applicants

Disadvantages of passive candidates

Dead ends — some candidates may ultimately not be interested in a new position
Risks of employee poaching and ethics
Higher salary costs for more qualified candidates

Active and passive candidate sourcing both have benefits, depending on your company’s situation. We recommend exploring passive sourcing for roles that require specific talent and experience that you’re not finding on the active job market. Take care to avoid job poaching with your immediate competitors, and be prepared to have polite declines from some of the talent that you reach out to.

Sources consulted

AIHR (Academy to Innovate HR), Passive Candidate Recruitment: How To Succees in 2025, accessed 2024-12-17
Rocket, Uncovering the Diamonds in the Rough: The Benefits of Sourcing and Engaging Passive Candidates, 2024-03-04, accessed 2024-12-17
Bamboo HR, HR Glossary: Passive Candidate, accessed 2024-12-17
Zappyhire, Top Recruitment Trends For HR Professionals 2024 (downloadable ebook), accessed 2024-12-17