“They’re out there. I can just feel it.” Such has been the mantra of executive recruiters for years. You know top talent is out there. It has to be. And yet, finding that most valuable candidate that matches the position perfectly is frustratingly elusive at times.

LinkedIn has decided to do something about that. The professional social network has recently introduced a new and exciting tool for passive candidates and executive recruiters called “Open Candidates.”

What Open Candidates Is

LinkedIn’s 2016 Global Talent Trends survey of 33,000 professionals around the globe reveals that a staggering 90 percent of global professionals are open to hearing from a recruiter. As it turns out, the pool of available talent is a lot deeper than executive recruiters may have previously believed.

Being open to hearing from a recruiter, however, is not the same thing as actively looking for a new position. Only 36 percent of those surveyed classified themselves as actively searching for something new.

The question for LinkedIn thus became how to facilitate the meeting of recruiters with those candidates who, while not actively seeking a new position, would be more than happy to learn about one.

The answer to that question came in early October with the announcement of the new LinkedIn feature Open Candidates. LinkedIn’s blog explains how it works, stating: “Open Candidates allows members to privately share with recruiters that they’re open to new opportunities, and indicate what types of roles they’re most interested in.”

What Open Candidates Means for Recruiters

LinkedIn reveals that there are already over a million open candidates that have signaled their interest in hearing from recruiters. What does this mean for executive recruiters?

It could be likened to getting the keys to the candy store when you are a kid. LinkedIn states: “For Recruiter customers, this means that for the first time ever, you can find candidates who have explicitly raised their hand to say, “I’m open to new opportunities” but are not applying to your jobs and may not know about your company. These open candidates are twice as likely to respond to your outreach.”

LinkedIn members can simply indicate their openness to recruiters by pressing a few simple buttons in their “Preferences” tab. Then, recruiters can find these open candidates by clicking the “open to new opportunities” tab in Recruiter Search.

Once there, executive recruiters can simply hover over an open candidate’s profile to learn about the positions that interest them, their experience, their available start date, and so on. This feature not only opens up a whole new pool of talent to search, but also saves time by providing information that would either qualify or disqualify a candidate in an interview process.


A quick look at how open candidates sign up.

Using Thrive TRM with LinkedIn

As the potential for a widely expanded pool from which to search emerges on LinkedIn, recruiters leveraging Thrive TRM’s robust talent management solution will likely see their talent pipelines deepen considerably.

The Thrive TRM Chrome extension makes it easy to create contacts from LinkedIn profiles. With Thrive TRM, you can quickly harness the power of LinkedIn and other social media channels to find and cultivate top talent for your firm. Schedule a demo today to see Thrive TRM at work.