Passive / non-portal candidates

I have come across numerous instances of recruiters wanting agencies to reach out to passive / non-portal candidates and want only "Head Hunted" profiles.

Do you want head hunted profiles or good candidates? Just because some people do not put their profiles on the portals, doesnt mean that they are good quality prospects. They could be as good / bad or even worse than the bunch that we see on the portals. When we talk of head hunting,

I have seen recruiters generating candidates thru cold calling and checking on the portals, if their profiles are present on the portals. This is the practise that I have come across many times, which gets followed blindly. Recruiters are praised on generating these "Non - portal" profiles, but how many go ahead and understand the quality / capability of these candidates.

In my view, this is just blind mining, which gives you more junk than desired and the recruiters always have the reason that getting the right match and the required number of candidates would always be less, as they need to be "hunted". Lots of instances where in you generate more non-relevant profiles while hunting than the relevant ones.

I strongly feel, hunting is done post research. Very less recruiters (apart from the exec hiring ones and very few contigency based hiring agencies) adopt this model. The need to know what a candidate is capable of, whether he / she fits the requirement, credentials, expertise, etc needs to be researched and then the candidate needs to be "hunted" and convinced. Else its no different from the big fishing trawlers who sweep the ocean for any kind of fish.

I know it takes a while to develop this habit of pre-hunting exercise, but needs to be started off. The market mapping, project mapping, candidate mapping, skill/technology mapping, etc needs to be focussed on and captured in the rigth way. The information which gets built over a period of time, by doing these activities are immensly valuable. This can be analyzed and built into a Knowledge Portal of the agency, which can be the USP in this very cluttered market.