Research in our recently published Report shows that from the candidates’ standpoint, there are problems throughout the recruiting funnel. At the front end where candidates enter, there is a superabundance of marginal or useless information. Search engines remain fairly blunt instruments even if one is a skilled researcher, which most job seekers are not. And too many employers continue to advertise themselves and their openings as if they were still recruiting in the age of paper-based annual reports and print-based job descriptions. In short, targeted, high quality information remains surprisingly scarce.
HAVE YOU EVER NOT APPLIED TO A COMPANY DUE TO ANY OF THESE DRAWBACKS?
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Staffing.org, 2009 Job Seeker Attitudes and Behaviors Report
Continuing to promote a company and its job openings using promotional formulas from 10 or 15 years ago is equivalent to betting on the future of a black and white, over-the-air television signal in the age of digital satellite and cable. In other words, applying old style thinking and methods to this new medium will simply not produce good results.
Despite computerization there are still major processing problems in the middle of the funnel. The Internet has certainly widened the recruiting funnel and allowed more job candidates to enter, but those people do not tell us that the application process in most companies is efficient and welcoming. In fact the opposite is true. They say that most applications generate no response or a clearly automated generic response. That was OK when every employer operated more or less the same way, but on the Internet they don’t and job seekers are noticing. In short, automation has done little to make many companies more attractive to job seekers although it may have made them more visible.
At the back of the funnel we have pervasive measurement issues. Efficiency and effectiveness are the twin imperatives of any business process and as sourcing candidates becomes more and more complex so does the need for metrics that prove which sources and procedures work better than others. “Shotgunning” the Internet channel for candidates can, without much sophistication, produce quantity, but quantity does not equal efficiency. If 900 resumes now yield the same number of hires that 90 did before and those hires are no more suitable, require equal effort to interview, hire and train, and don’t stay with the firm any longer, then little has been gained except – and this is not a given - substituting lower cost ATS candidate processing for old-fashioned, paper-based, people-based processing.
Aside from complexity and immaturity, the problem with Internet recruiting is its evolutionary speed. Individuals can alter their behavior much more quickly than organizations can, particularly large ones. The problem is especially true where enterprise technology is involved. Pushing upgrades to a recruiting process, such as adding functionality to a career site, can take a long time, perhaps even several complete budget cycles if there are a lot of competing corporate priorities. Internet services develop new capabilities much more quickly: semi-annually, quarterly, even monthly. The following illustration of the problem was taken from a sample of marketing professionals, not recruiting professionals, but it is entirely consistent with our research into marketing effectively to job candidates.
Which factors have presented the most significant barriers to social media adoption in your organization or client?
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So what do candidates want beyond just a simple paycheck and benefit plan? Our research answers clearly. They want communication and information. They don’t want to provide a CV in a one-way transaction, they want to exchange it for corporate information. The Internet has raised their expectations for this considerably. They are becoming used to passing enormous quantities of information back and forth with one another and even with total strangers. The burgeoning social forums of Web 2.0 are built largely on this phenomenon.
Have you ever applied to a company you were not otherwise familiar with because its website impressed you?
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Staffing.org, 2009 Job Seeker Behaviors and Attitudes Report
What we have in the Internet is an explosion of the possibilities for this potential exchange. Candidates are discovering they want this. They are looking for a way to connect to the organization. They want a relationship. They want to get down to the nitty-gritty, poke into the closets, get the skinny, be clued in. In today’s insecure world, they want the greatest security that being “in the know” can provide.
Providing a rich, robust, ongoing, proactive, flow of communications is not the easiest thing for organizations. Organizations don’t like complexity. Complexity makes things harder to organize, harder to manage and more expensive. They battle against it. One could even say that one of the functions of an organization is to tame complexity and reduce it to predictable, repeatable and profitable processes.
Thus traditional corporate recruiting has always been pushed toward simplicity – get the requisitions; post the jobs; solicit the resumes; interview, select and vet the candidates, and hire. So we have two forces in collision, one embracing complexity and one focusing on simplicity.
In the competition for talent, those who cling to simplicity will ultimately lose. The Internet is not going away and not about to stop evolving. Nor will candidates stop recalibrating their expectations according to the robust communication it offers. We are well past the threshold into a new world of recruiting. Talent is the client and the client wants what he wants. If you give him anything less, and he can exercise other options, you lose. It’s that simple.
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