The most recent Career Xroads Sources of Hire survey was released recently. If you are not familiar with it, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have been conducting this study for over a decade. The survey looked at data from 36 companies with over 200,000 job openings to determine the key sources of hire and the interrelationships between key hiring sources.
According to the study, the top four sources of hire include:
1. Referrals (28%)
2. Job boards (20.1%)
3. Career sites (9.8%)
4. Recruiters (9.1%)
While job boards account for 1 in 5 hires, they are shown to have a much larger influence on the job seeker community through providing branding, visibility and a wider distribution for job postings.
More than 45.7% of the respondents said they were using job boards for ads, but not resume search. One reason for this is that many recruiters have not been trained in how to source candidates on a job board. All ClearedJobs.Net customers have access to complimentary tutorials on how to search and sources candidates on the Cleared Job Board.
With the explosion of social media applications and tools, it is surprising that only 3.5% of the hires were attributable to social media. LinkedIn did rank as the highest for being the most useful place to post jobs and search for resumes. The other important data included information about referrals; only 1 in 10 referrals resulted in an actual hire.
Gerry and Mark have to be commended for creating an in-depth study that has been conducted over 10 years to showcase the trends in recruiting, and for building the study to reveal the interrelationships between so many recruiting methods. As all great recruiting organizations know, building relationships across many platforms will yield the best results.
Kathleen – can you give a bit more of a teaser on those tutorials? Maybe a video clip or resource excerpt? Curious…
Also, wondering if this begs the question: how do you build a better job board – one that makes it easier to source candidates quickly?
Andy, this is actually the preview to a very in depth study that is done by Career Xroads. Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have been doing this study for over 10 years. They also have started the Candidate Experience Award which looks at how companies treat candidates through the application process. It is very interesting.
To your second question/comment, I have a very different perspective than most in the industry as many ‘Job boards” look at how they make the process easier for the employers to sources candidates quickly. The challenge is that you need to make the job board easier for the job seeker to post their profile and understand the process so that they can be sourced better. You can drive alot of traffic to your site but if you don’t assist the talent to be part of the process, no one succeeds.
Even though job boards have been around for almost 20 years, job seekers do not understand how the recruiter is looking for them in the job board. Some key points are:
If you have posted your resume on a job board 6 months ago and are wondering why no one is contacting you? It is because recruiters are only looking at resumes posted in the last 30 days. Anything older is not going to be looked at. Just “refresh” your resume and that says “Yes, I am still interested in being contacted”
If you use the top two inches of your resume for pretty contact information and a “so so” summary statement, you are not going to get looked at. Why? The top two inches is what a recruiter sees in the “Preview” area of their search. Only if you have the key info: certs, accomplishments, skills list will they fully open your resume. Why? Because Preview is how we all look at the world and it does not trigger OFCCP.
If you don’t have the same key words in your Profile or Resume that they recruiter is looking for you are not going to be searched. Why? Because a recruiter take 10 seconds to look at the search results at best. If you are not in the top 25 results, you are not going to be looked at further. Your keywords are going to bring you up farther in the search.
Hope that helps!