There is certainly no doubt that social media, job boards, the Internet at large, and Big Data have all had an impact on the employment marketplace and on companies’ hiring efforts.
However, it might not be the impact you’re thinking it is.
At first glance, you could easily believe that with so many technological tools at companies’ disposal, it would be easier to find the candidates they want for their open positions. That simply is not the case.
There are two main things that are important to any successful search—talent identification and speed-to-hire. Companies must be able to locate the talent they’re seeking (presumably the best talent in the marketplace) and they must be able to recruit and hire that talent as quickly as possible.
There are two drawbacks to not being able to accomplish this:
- The organization hires sub-par talent, which is eventually reflected in both production and profits.
- The time that the position is left open costs the company money in terms of lost productivity.
With all of this in mind, here’s the problem with social media and job boards: they increase the number of job seekers who apply for an organization’s open position.
You may not think of that as a problem until you ask yourself this question: “How many of those additional job seekers are actually high-quality candidates—the best candidates?”
In this case, more is not necessarily better. That’s because essentially what we’re talking about are more unqualified job seekers. If you have 10 people who apply for your open position that you don’t want to hire, is it better if you now have 100 such people? Obviously, it’s not.
And that is why social media and job boards increase the need for experienced recruiters.
Let’s say, for example, that an organization’s hiring manager has received plenty of applications for job listings and postings, more than they can handle. Unfortunately, this influx of applicants has not helped the manager’s talent identification and speed-to-hire efforts. If anything, they’ve impeded those efforts.
Here’s how a recruiter can help the hiring manager in this situation:
- Provide access to top passive candidates who are not looking for a new job
- Surface difficult-to-find superstar candidates who are even further “off the radar,” so to speak
- Relieve the workload of the hiring manager, who can stop filtering through the volume of applications by non-qualified job seekers and instead focus on interviewing the top candidates now being presented
These are just a few of the ways a recruiter can help during the search process. There are other ways, as well, including actually recruiting passive superstar candidates to generate interest in the position and the company and making the offer of employment to ensure that the candidate accepts it.
Social media, job boards, Big Data . . . none of these things can provide the unique value that recruiters provide. In fact, they often complicate and convolute the hiring process by increasing the pool of unqualified applicants and job seekers.
Complicated and convoluted does not aid in talent identification and speed-to-hire. If you have an urgent hiring need that is not being filled and the posting of job ads is proving unfruitful, this is the time to reach out to an experienced executive recruiting firm for better results.
We help support careers in one of two ways: 1. By helping to find the right opportunity when the time is right, and 2. By helping to recruit top talent for the critical needs of organizations. If this is something you would like to explore further, please send an email to stacy@thevetrecruiter.com.