Four Trends Affecting the Future of Recruiting
In his recent article Lou Adler revealed some trends that might help you develop your future recruiting strategies:
On one level, it means that if a candidate uses a search engine to look for a job rather than a job board, your posting will appear in the first few postings. Regardless of how you go about it, if you want to hire top people in the future, expect to become an expert using search engines. Once you become an expert at figuring out how to get your boring ads found, you’ll be ready to convert all of these into compelling career messages.
In a recent Execunet survey, 70% of over 6,000 executives and executive recruiters indicated that networking would be the key to either finding a job or finding candidates, compared to 16% through online advertising.
Also in the Adler Concepts 2007 survey of 800 corporate recruiters filling staff and mid-level positions indicated that networking and employee referrals represented about 35% to 40% of their hires.This is about five points higher than last year, so not only is networking important, but the trend is up. LinkedIn has helped accelerate this trend, in combination with Facebook, MySpace, and some of the niche social networking sites.
At the employment agency referred to earlier, referrals were also a core part of their recruiting efforts. While this group was primarily placing hourly personnel in general laborer or office admin positions on temporary assignments, it seemed like at least 50% of their recruits were from referrals. More important, the emphasis was on getting even more referrals.
As narrowcasting becomes more prevalent, it will be even more important to plan a channel strategy and track the performance of each ad. Since this is how Internet advertising is priced, recruiting departments will soon be getting a real education on the impact and use of proper forecasting, performance tracking, and Web analytics.
Our 2008 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey revealed two big problems. The first was pretty obvious: 76% of the 775 respondents said it was becoming increasingly difficult to find enough top candidates.
The second problem was a bit unexpected: 59% of the respondents said their hiring manager clients were the real problem in recruiting top people. While this is a pretty big gap to bridge, the Adler Concepts data suggests that this difference is narrowing.
While being a partner means different things to different recruiters, one thing is certain, recruiters who are partners understand the job, the company, and the hiring manager’s real needs. They also send in fewer candidates per hire, have more influence in the decision, and get called to handle more search assignments.
The future is rapidly approaching. Taking these trends into account will help you get ready for it.
Tags: recruitment, trends