Hello,
Here is an article showing the trends in the recruitments.
Happy Reading
Raghav
Founder HRinIndia
www.hrinindia.in
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Organizations plan to spend less on print and major job boards, and more on Web 2.0 elements, such as social and business networking sites, referral programs, blogs, video and virtual worlds. The war for talent and the inability of the job board behemoths to find quality candidates are prompting the move.
By Tom Starner
The recruiting times, they certainly are a-changin'.
And based on a recent survey of 177 recruiters and HR executives across the country, the changes are good for so-called Web 2.0 technologies -- virtual worlds, blogs, online forums, social networks and video resume sites -- and bad for the more traditional advertising tools of print advertising and Web recruitment sites, a.k.a. job boards.
The survey, entitled Recruitment Advertising: Moving in New Directions, was conducted by Classified Intelligence LLC, a classified advertising consultancy in Altamonte Spring, Fla. It polled mostly company recruiters and HR executives in fall 2007, and it was conducted in conjunction with ERE Media Inc., an online recruitment community.
According to the study, participants surveyed -- from companies ranging from $5 million to $5 billion in annual revenues (and from a variety of industry segments) -- said they would spend more on business-networking sites, social networking and employee-referral programs in 2008 than in 2007, but less on print and traditional job boards.
Peter Zollman, Classified Intelligence's founding partner, explains that while online job sites are still considered valuable tools (second only to employee referrals as a source of new hires), dissatisfaction with general online recruitment sites is growing due to the waning quality of candidates.
"Our report shows the increasing role blogs, social networking, online forums, video clips, billboards and other 'alternative' advertising methods now play in recruitment," Zollman says.
"As recruiters move away from print, they are becoming increasingly creative in using new ways, even virtual worlds, to find candidates."
According to the report, six in 10 (61 percent) of those surveyed anticipate spending more of their recruitment budgets on sites such as Facebook or other social-networking sites.
Business-networking sites, such as LinkedIn and employee-referral programs, followed closely behind, with 55 percent of employers saying they will allocate more dollars to them in 2008, while roughly the same amount said they plan to spend less on print.
About one-third (35 percent) of the respondents said they plan to increase their spending on job boards such as Monster and CareerBuilder -- down slightly from 2007, while about three in 20 (14 percent) intend to decrease spending on those sites this year.
Video recruitment tools were gaining traction, with respondents saying they would use sites more sites like VideoJobShop.com, which combines elements of many sites such as Monster, YouTube, Craigslist and Facebook.
For relatively low fees, the site allows employers to post videos describing work environment and benefits packages. The site also offers pre-recorded videos describing common occupations.
On the flip side, job candidates can upload video resumes to get in front of an employer. A "widget" also allows job candidates to link online resumes to Facebook profiles.
Other sites that use video for recruiting in one way or another include HireVue.com and careertours.com. In fact, Zollman says, the report shows several examples of recruiters who experienced a tremendous increase in quality response -- albeit limited in number -- through the use of video.
CareerXroads, a staffing consultancy in Kendall Park, N.J., also released a recent report on recruiting and hiring, the CareerXroads 7th Source of Hire Study. While the report didn't address the specific use of new Web 2.0 recruiting strategies, it did find that employers are slowly moving away from print and job boards.
For example, the CXR study, which included 49 firms that filled 303,000 openings during 2007, found that "hires directly from job boards" declined from 33 percent in 2006 to 25.7 percent in 2007.
"We can see how budgets may be shifting and changing, and results don't always immediately follow the use of new technologies," says Gerry Crispin, a co-founder of CareerXroads. "There is typically a lag effect, where new recruiting strategies do not bear fruit immediately. They are more a long-term type of benefit.
"In our study, there is a distinct trend to the direct source-type strategies, which is also reflected in the Classified Intelligence report," Crispin says.
According to Vangie Sison, executive director of recruitment media and marketing for First Advantage Recruiting Solutions in Indianapolis, employers are competing for the best talent during a time when corporate America faces a 55 million worker shortage because of the retiring baby boomers. So they need to be more creative to win the hiring battles.
"Companies need to be aware of the ever-changing landscape of the Internet and leverage the many ways that their candidates are communicating, expressing and consuming information," she says. "Whether it's by allowing them to become a fan of your brand in their social net, or by showing them what your company culture is in the places where they watch videos online, or by chatting with them one on one in the virtual world they live in.
"The Google generation, the generation that doesn't remember life without the Internet, has entered the workforce," Sison says.
Classified Intelligence's Zollman says the biggest surprise in his survey's results was that recruiters are getting so experimental.
"We would not have expected so much work on [virtual world] sites like Second Life," he says. "And we were impressed by the number of blogs and social-networking efforts. As the war for talent is growing, some people are getting very creative."
Zollman says there are two main reasons traction has improved for more creative approaches. One, the old methods just aren't working that well any more, including the generic job boards.
"Job boards still work well for certain positions well, but for professional and niche job candidates, not as well," he says.
Second, the war for talent is happening right now, and will continue as baby boomers retire, so employers and recruiters are trying to get a jump, and will try whatever the competition isn't trying.
"These new approaches are getting more powerful," Zollman says. "Just two to three years ago, Heather Hamilton [of Microsoft] was the only employer blogger on the net. Today, there are hundreds.
"While it's somewhat unfair to call it a full-blown trend yet, it's certainly a vanguard," he adds. "Where there was nothing just a couple of years ago, now there is something with a lot of promise."
March 5, 2008
Copyright 2008© LRP Publications
