The traditional sources of candidates are familiar and well understood. However, relatively new Internet sources continue to roil the waters of candidate sourcing, rising to the #2 and #3 places on our sourcing list in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Employers are experiencing this as a mixed blessing: more viable candidates overall, but at the price of increased processing inefficiency. In other words, more wheat but also more chaff.
Source: 2010 Corporate Recruiting Report
(See chart of industry breakdowns at the end of this article)
Internet-based sourcing numbers are stunning.
Jobs Posted Online
- 1996 – 1.2 million
- 1998 – 28.7 million
- 2009 – 100 million plus? But no one really has a clue. The Conference Board measured 1,200 U.S. job boards (there are about 50,000 of them) in January 2009 and reported that 3.35 million jobs were posted in that month alone. Factor in jobs posted on private corporate sites, all the niche sites and foreign sites, then eliminate duplicate postings, out of date listings and phantom listings (designed purely to attract resumes) and it’s anybody’s guess.
Employment Websites
- 1996 – 3,500
- 2008 – 50,102
- 2012 – 105,000 (projected)
Resumes Posted
- 1996 – 1 million
- 2009 – 90 million and rising. Hundreds of millions if you count social media profiles as tacit resumes
In an absolute sense the new channels have succeeded extremely well. Employers can access huge numbers of resumes and candidates can access huge numbers of job openings. However, that success has created new problems, including:
- Clutter: An enormous amount of extraneous material in the system that buries what one is looking for in a large amount of what one is not looking for, the classic needle in the haystack problem.
- Quality: Poorly defined job postings intersecting inaccurate resumes, otherwise known as “garbage meets garbage.”
- Noise: Increasing communication of decreasing significance.
- Measurement: Inadequate systems to measure productivity against more traditional recruiting channels.
To confront these problems, best-in-class companies are focusing on:
- Yield analysis: to determine the sources providing the highest percentage of qualified candidates per dollar spent.
- Quality control: to better identify and filter candidate leads.
- Process improvement: to create less friction, more transparency, and better communication for the candidate throughout the application and selection process.
- More and better public information: concerning job openings, benefits, career tracks and corporate culture.
- Candidate communities: pools of pre-screened, pre-disposed applicants.
- Magnetic branding: to create experiences that pull desirable candidates into and through the recruiting funnel.
- Integrated systems: to optimize both internal and external recruiting channels.
2010 Corporate Recruiting Report
This article is excerpted from Chapter 10 of our 2010 Corporate Recruiting Report. For additional data on new candidates, use these channels, and check out Mastering Internet Recruiting: Job Seekers Attitudes and Behaviors in our web store. |
