Who do jobseekers turn to when the market picks up?
Author: Simon Lewis
Author: Simon Lewis
Share: When the jobs market recovers will it be recruitment agencies or job boards who prevail? Will there be room for both? 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 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 theyve 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. 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. In-house recruitment 2010 will see the [re]-birth of the in-house recruiter. SMEs & 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. Simon Lewis | Editor | Only Marketing JobsAbout the Author:
Creative writer within the marketing recruitment industry. A content writer, producer and distributor with gregarious thoughts about the staffing sector. Follow me on Twitter @simonlewisomj