Job boards versus recruitment agencies: the gathering storm
When the jobs market recovers will it be recruitment agencies or job boards who 
prevail? Will there be room for both?
“We are going to recover from this downturn, and when we do, the talent shortage is going to be more severe than anything we experienced a year or two ago. Finding talent, connecting with this talent and building talent communities is going to be what separates the winners from the losers in the recruitment industry, in my opinion.
Sourcing talent will become far more fragmented in the future, and candidates will be accessed from an ever increasing variety of channels including social media, blogs, specialty sites, as well as user and special interest groups. Job boards will play a role, certainly, especially niche boards, but increasingly they will become less effective, particularly when it comes to connecting with the elusive passive candidates.” Greg Savage, The Savage Truth
Here are my thoughts:
Job boards with initiative will thrive in niche areas
By engaging with social media and being malleable enough to embrace change (not just technological) sector-specific sites can develop fantastic communities, attracted by real-time, visual information. Any decent job board is run by people who understand their community – yes, community! Job boards with content and services to offer aside from just jobs will attract candidates, even passive ones.
Recruitment agencies should evolve
Traditional recruitment consultancies will continue to provide a service provided they a) work in partnership with innovative job boards and b) act more as ‘consultancies’ than body-shops and learn to attract the passive jobseeker, not people they’ve pulled from generic ‘talent pools’. The days of mainstream recruitment agencies with average recruiting staff, are dead.
Social media
Social media is a brilliant channel for attracting talent to the main hub. It is not, in itself, a viable recruitment tool, for whilst the engagement is clearly transparent and authentic it remains too difficult to police.
In-house recruitment
2010 will see the [re]-birth of the in-house recruiter. SME’s & corporate businesses will pay big bucks to experienced talent attractors, give them a budget and allow them to get on with it. A successful in-house recruiter will need to use all above mentioned talent-attraction channels for different purposes. However, without question the most obvious ROI will come from niche job boards. Provided they are not just a reactive space on the web job boards provide the best guarantee/cost ratio.
Here are my thoughts to some opinions of one disgruntled jobseeker:
“I applied for 100 jobs across 70 job boards 2 weeks ago”
- In a climate (albeit, improving) where jobs are supposedly hard to find, well done for managing to identify so many positions relevant to you. However, I can’t help but suspect not all the jobs were applicable to your skill-set. Are you sure you weren’t ‘chancing your arm’. There are a number of jobseekers in the market ‘having a go’. Applying for roles not entirely right for you only heightens your expectations so you get annoyed when the calls don’t come in.
“I did not receive one single phone call or email”
- Supposing for a moment the 100 jobs you applied were all relevant to your skill set I would take a look at your CV and cover letter. Clearly you are not submitting the appropriate applications.
“A lot of recruitment agencies post fake jobs to collate CV’s through job boards”
- Yes, this can be the case. But I doubt it is in the current climate. Short of renewable energy and certain Governmental departments there are not many sectors short of jobseekers. I can assure you the last thing recruiters need right now is more candidates flooding through the door. The recruiter’s lot is already a minefield of admin and protocol, without adding fake job postings to the mix.
You suggest ‘90% of jobs posted on job boards by recruitment agencies are fake’: I’d be interested to see where you got this figure from. It costs recruiters money to advertise jobs on job boards. You’re suggesting they are happy to waste 90% of their marketing budgets on speculative talent attraction. I doubt it!
“In my opinion it’s better to apply directly to companies – that way there is no mass competition.”
- What planet are you on? Recruitment agencies are assigned by direct employers (so the recruiter’s client) to attract, select, then submit the best candidates for a specific role. The reason [most] recruitment agencies exist is for their expertise in doing this. The client is assured that they might only receive, say ten, candidates for their vacancy instead of the hundred’s they would undoubtedly receive if they advertised themselves. (This point takes ATS out of the equation).
Imagine Nike advertising a role directly. Do you REALLY think the competition for a job with them is less than a role you might apply for via an agency?
N. Jones: take stock of what you’re applying to and which channels you’re using. Ask someone to look at your CV and cover letter and realise that recruiters and recruitment media are there to help you. By viewing them as an enemy rather than an ally you will make your job search more difficult than clearly it already is.
To read more on this topic and see other comments visit The Savage Truth If you want to read more about my thoughts on recruitment and getting back to work check out my blog http://recruitmentwaters.com
Simon Lewis | Only Marketing Jobs
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