Ok - This article isn't for everyone. If you're already finding great candidates for all your open job positions by hanging up descriptions o­n your Web site, posting your job ads o­n your favorite mass-market job board and rooting through the resumes found in o­nline banks then don't read any further. Feel free to keep the article open so it looks like you are doing something, but you owe yourself a few rounds of Spider Solitaire as a reward for a job well done. We'll be back in a few minutes to let you know when it's time to fire up the ATS again.

What, you're still here? It's "passive candidates" you want? Ok. That means they are already working somewhere, right? Let's start with where that is. Executive recruiters, a.k.a. headhunters, have always been fond of calling these "source companies." It is a truism of the executive search world that "there are two kinds of companies - clients and sources." While corporate recruiters have been unwilling or unable to paint their world in strokes quite that bold, the fact of the matter is that if we define passive candidates as "someone who already has a job," than recruiting these people must make their current employer a source company.

So we've gotten past that bit of semantics. Now comes the fun part. How do we find people in "source companies?" Well, there are lots of ways. The AIRS Search Lab teaches eight full hours o­n the topic and will have you loading up the proverbial bus with potential passive candidates in no time. But here's an easy way to find some people right away and the best part is, the source company is going to help us.

We're going to start right up at a company's Web site. For the purposes of this example we'll use the health care manufacturer Guidant Corporation. o­n almost all corporate Web sites you will be offered some means of contacting people (selling products and services being pretty difficult otherwise.) Look for a link that's called, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, or something similar and try to find the individual locations the company may have.

In smaller companies there may be just o­ne main address but in many companies you will find several different locations - sometimes these are just field offices for sales folk; for obvious reasons these are particularly effective if you recruit sales people. In our example, Guidant has a link called "About Us" and within it another link for locations. o­n this page we are presented with the addresses of the corporate headquarters and each of the operating locations of the company.

Next, open up a new window in your browser and point it at your favorite search engine, for my searches it is hard to argue with Google's 8-Billion page index and I like the Advanced Search tab because it saves the trouble of using quotes around the address. Next, simply paste the address of o­ne of the locations into the search engine. This is an "exact phrase" search, so unless you are using that corresponding box, make sure to put quotes around the address.

A search o­n Guidant's address in Santa Clara, California ("3200 Lakeside Drive") yields 359 results. Clicking through the first 20 of these produces 8 Guidant folks that work at that facility, not to mention dozens of other people from other companies that are also in Guidant's industry. The best part is, because you are searching using o­ne type of contact information (the address) as a keyword, finding the other types of contact information (telephone numbers and e-mail addresses) o­n the same page is quite common. Now there are five other locations spread out around the country you can search in the same way. As you do, you will begin to notice patterns about the focus of each location, this is extremely helpful if you are trying to create an org chart of the company.

You will find that most companies have specific enough addresses that you don't run into instances of other companies sharing the same address. But there are cases where this happens. If it does, simply add the company name to the search string with an AND - make sure, however, that you don't add it to the exact phrase.

Ok, for all those folks playing Spider, it's time to get back to work. You didn't miss much, all we did was talk about stuff that's right up o­n any company Web site.