A recent HR.com survey focused on how different types of candidate sourcing lead to improved candidate quality and cost effectiveness. I only want to talk about the quality piece here as you can go to HR.com for the survey if desired.
There was more detail in the survey, but I break the results down into 3 basic source types. There is the relationship source, the high-tech source, and the low-tech source. The relationship source includes employee referrals and people from professional networks. This source of candidates provided the highest overall quality of people. The high-tech source includes company websites, job boards, etc.. and this yielded a candidate quality slightly above average. Lastly were the low-tech sources such as newspapers and walk-ins. These were deemed to generate below average quality candidates.
None of this should be at all surprising. Obviously we want our employees to bring in people they know fit the organization, want to work with, and want to benefit from the organization. In order to cultivate this environment where employees are readily giving your recruiters leads, you have to do some communications to let them know its available, provide some monetary incentives, but most of all provide a work environment where people would be happy to recommend their friends into.
That means recruiters are left with the traditional sources, of which the most effective is the technology source. This is obvious for a couple of reasons: people who can navigate the web and do so comfortably are more likely people you want to hire compared to people you find in the newspaper (clearly this is a white collar bias to candidate quality on my part). Technology also has the wonderful capability of notifying potential candidates when a possible job match comes up. This allows employers to somewhat tap into the passive market as well. (Case in point – this is what happened to me. I wasn’t looking for a job, but had auto notifications turned on for years at a job board. Finally one of them interested me.)
I’m a bit out of order, but my next post is on WebHire and Monster.com integration. Take a look at that when it’s posted.
