The Arbita Recruitment Genome Project research in early 2009 demonstrated that most companies’ sourcing functions are not taking advantage of the shift in candidate behavior. In the third quarter of 2009 we conducted a new survey and once again, thousands participated. We then compared the results to our baseline data and noticed some improvement. Here is what we found:
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) continues to be the least utilized lead generation tactic. About 37% of respondents felt they had a good strategy for marketing their employment opportunities using pay-per-click, direct ads and other SEM techniques. This is up 19% from survey results in early 2009.
However, Google’s Keyword Tool shows that each month at least 775 million searches are conducted on Google, about 226 million of them job-related. That means that just under a third (and quite possibly more) of the questions being asked on Google are related to job search. Are your sourcing efforts taking advantage of this passive candidate traffic goldmine?
Among the thousands of respondents, we found an amazing 16% increase in confidence around having adequate training on Internet research and sourcing, now 63%! That still leaves over a third of the population with unsatisfactory sourcing skills. But even the strongest sourcers need to stay up to date. Learning and improvement is a continuous process. So how should your team keep up with best practices and changes in sourcing technologies like data mining techniques, sourcing automation, semantic search, social and emerging media sourcing, etc.?
Other survey results indicated that of the respondents:
- 43% feel they have a good strategy for SEO, up 17%.
- 52% are happy with their career web sites, up 5%.
- 53% were satisfied with job boards, identical to our survey earlier in the year.
- 53% feel they have a good plan for finding candidates using search engines like Google and Bing.com, up 6%.
- 56% feel they have a good strategy for finding candidates on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, up 9%.
The future is very near, and as economic recovery turns the corner employers need to prepare for the coming rise in demand. Proliferation of social and emerging media brings with it the promise of convergence, integration and portability. Soon more true contact management features will integrate social and emerging media into your ATS/HRIS systems, rich media analytics will track any of your sources ad-hoc, career microsites will bring online social networks together into dashboards and integrate them with your CRM.
Join us at Sourcecon on Sunday, March 14th to experience more of the above learnings from your peers and our industry leaders. We’ll also discuss how certain sourcing techniques can build or erode your employment brand. Transparency in the social Internet increases both positive and negative exposure, and with the obliteration of privacy, brings to light how sourcers can quickly build or ruin an employment brand. See you in March!