For the fifth year in a row, ERE readers can respond to a short survey on industry trends and issues. The key concerns that you had last year centered on the best recruiting measures and how to assess the quality of hires. You also reported growing recruiting activity in general, as well as a greatly increased number of new requisitions.
Everyone I spoke with at the ERE Expo in San Diego a few weeks ago indicated that things are indeed booming again. Recruiters are finding that they have their choice of new opportunities, and budgets have increased, but so has the dissatisfaction with traditional tools, methods of sourcing, and communicating with candidates. Quality of hire is directly related to how well you have defined the job and how well you have matched candidates against those requirements. If hiring is done well, it means that you or someone in your organization has defined competencies, made sure those competencies are the real drivers of the performance that the hiring managers need, and has developed assessments to measure whether candidates have those competencies. An essential part of success in finding qualified candidates is a branding and marketing effort focused on enticing the right kind of people to come to you. This effort should have as its goal the building and maintaining of a pool of candidates that has been partially screened. Without this pool, recruiters will never be able to break out of the short-term sourcing dilemma that many find themselves in. By focusing on branding and on marketing to a selected group of potential candidates, recruiters can find enough interested and qualified people to form the core of an expanding pool of good, potential hires. And, by combining this activity with communication tools, recruiters should rarely have to worry about sourcing candidates. Yet, last year’s survey indicated that fewer recruiters than ever were creating these talent pools, and sourcing was becoming a major issue. That has been confirmed through many conversations I have had with clients about sourcing, one of the hottest topics among clients and ERE readers alike. The active/passive debate never goes away. It is the same conversation I had 20 years ago with fellow recruiters. The only change is the Internet and how it requires us to grapple with and define the ethics and policies that should govern how we approach passive candidates. The only solution to the issues it creates is to actively create talent pools. Assessment is another hot topic because many recruiters are opposed to using tests and evaluation tools, either for perceived legal reasons or because they believe them to be one-dimensional or inaccurate. Both are valid reasons to be cautious, but not valid enough to prevent assessment testing from being a part of a bigger process.
This survey will help us get an understanding of what types of tools you are using and why you are using them. Assessment allows you to create the pools of qualified talent that you require in order to quickly meet hiring managers’ demands and to be assured that the people you are recommending really do have the skills and competencies that hirers need. This survey will also help us clarify how things have evolved in the past 12 months. As the economy has grown, the need for people has also expanded. This growth trend almost always catches us unprepared and forces a reactive response. It will be interesting to see how many people have been able to develop proactive approaches that have let them reduce the need for short-term actions.
To complete the survey and help give all of us a clearer picture of today’s recruiting trends, simply click here. You will be taken to the survey site where you can quickly and anonymously provide your thoughts. Completing the survey should take you less than 15 minutes, and a summary of results will be published here on ERE in about two weeks. A free white paper will be available soon thereafter with complete results.