Where do jobseekers turn now the market has picked up?
As the jobs market recovers will it be recruitment agencies or job boards who prevail? Will there be room for both?
It’s all about the communities…
“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
I first wrote this blog six months ago. I thought it might have required an update now. But it didn’t.
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 and poor propositions based mainly on reduced fees, are dead. Read how recruiter success is now measured by the depth of their communities.
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. Social media is also hugely time-consuming and this is one channel that cannot afford to be attacked half-heartedly. As social media measurement develops will be arguments to claim it as the pinnacle of job-seeking sources. But not yet.
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.
If you’re a jobseeker, where do you go to find a job? Comments welcome below.
You might also like to read: Is The Role of The Traditional Recruiter Being Eroded by Social Networking?
Simon Lewis | Editor | Only Marketing Jobs
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- Guess what? Candidates are customers, too!
- How do recruiters find the best candidates?
- Jobseekers need to learn a little respect
- Only Marketing Jobs hires social media manager
- How jobseeker behaviour affects job boards
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