Shifts in Recruitment Methods

We stumbled across an intriguing article in Personnel Today earlier.

The bulk of the article explains that many companies have moved to cut recruitment costs, principally by implementing on-line strategies. This is not unexpected, given the vast cost savings this can bring whilst simultaneously improving captive audiences and streamlining the process of hiring staff.

The really interesting part of this is perception of recruitment branding. It seems that whilst an admirable 42% of companies have made efforts to improve and promote their recruitment brand, few HR Practitioners rated it a succesful approach. At the same time, recruitment agencies get a bashing for being too expensive, whilst apparently on-line job advertising is seen as one of the most effective changes that can be made to a company's recruitment strategy.

Now, we have a lot of experience with on-line advertising and recruitment branding here at Idealpeople, so perhaps we're biased, but we felt the need to repsond.

On-line advertising is an effective way of sourcing candidates, but by no means is it a tool to ensure that you find the best possible people to come and work with you.

Some 85% of people would change jobs if offered better terms, better prospects or a better environment, yet only 10% of people are ever actively involved in a job search at any one time. Of that 10%, only 27% find their job through the internet, so by relying entirely on the cheap (and and not-too-bad) on-line channel alone, the target audience of any open position is just 3% of what it could be if:

- You had a strong recruitment brand which makes people want to come and work for you, irrespective of whether they've seen an advert on-line
- You were able to rely on recruitment partners able to communicate that brand to the 75% of who would change jobs but who aren't actively looking to, as well as to the 10% of people who are looking for work
- You combined this with effective on-line advertising strategies.

Now, for all we know, you may be able to find the best talent available from that 3%, but we wouldn't bank on it.

It's interesting that there is no measurement provided for effectiveness in the article: the idea that recruitment branding isn't effective seems to be a subjective view as opposed to anything else.

Companies interested in hiring the very best talent available go to great lengths to attract people to work for them, otherwise people wouldn't bother. In fact, in a dream world, a recruitment brand could be so strong that so many people are knocking on your door to come and work for you that you don't need to advertise, ever.

So is Recruitment Branding ineffective? We'd argue that those who think it is need to consider what their motivations are: to hire people cheaply or to hire the best available, at least until we find some measured statistics to demonstrate how powerful it is.