For the sixth year, you have the opportunity to respond to a short survey on industry trends and issues. We have been doing this to help highlight what’s happening and also to illuminate some of the activities going on in our space.
Why are social networks so hot? What’s driving the frenzy around sourcing? Hopefully, this survey will help us answer some of these questions. Whatever the results, we can be sure that things are clearly changing once again in the world of recruiting.
Last year’s survey indicated that fewer recruiters than ever were creating 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.
I see recruiters everywhere focusing more and more on the scarcity of skilled talent and on the sourcing issues that this creates. There is renewed emphasis on sourcing tools, Internet search, and employment branding, all indicators to me of a limited talent pipeline.
Everyone I spoke with at the ERE Expo in San Diego in April indicated that things are indeed booming. High-tech, finance, and medical professions remain tight. Recruiters are also in high demand. I have had more phone calls from headhunters looking for recruiters than I have had in years.
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.
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. By combining this activity with communication tools, recruiters should rarely have to worry about sourcing candidates.
New tools are emerging that I will write about in the next few weeks that promise to take job boards to new places and merge social networking with career sites.
The active/passive debate never goes away. It is the same conversation I had 20 years ago with fellow recruiters. I don’t believe there are very many passive candidates, just people who have never heard of you, your firm, or the opportunity you have for them. Given a good opportunity that excites them, anyone can quickly become an active candidate.
Assessment is also a hot topic and several firms are getting more creative, moving to simulations and building the assessment into a process that makes it fun and almost painless. I’ll showcase a few examples here soon.
This survey will help us validate these comments and observations and also help us clarify how things have evolved in the past 12 months.
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.