How Are People Finding Jobs?

Posted on September 6, 2007
Filed Under Online Recruiting, Employment Websites, Applicant Tracking, Best Practices, War for Talent |

Written By Peter Weddle, Weddles

How are people finding jobs? It’s an important question, of course, because answering it correctly enables you to make smart decisions when selecting recruitment advertising venues and, as a result, upgrade the quality of the candidates you are able to recruit.

Traditional “source of hire” surveys turn to us, the recruiters who interact with job candidates, to answer the question. It’s a reasonable approach, I guess, but one that has at least two serious problems:

First, we rely on our applicant tracking systems and the data they collect from candidates to provide the answer. Many of these systems, however, force candidates to identify their source of information about an opening by selecting from an often incomplete and out-of-date list and thus are notoriously inaccurate.
Second, source of hire surveys normally sample a very small population of employers and collect the data they report as averages. They then establish an overall set of results by averaging the employers’ averages, an approach which can overemphasize data trends and minimize important data anomalies.

To avoid these deficiencies, we at WEDDLE’s launched a Source of Employment Survey last year. This study has the following benefits:

First, it acquires information directly from working men and women. As a consequence, it avoids the distorting filter of applicant tracking systems and the inaccuracies of their data.
Second, it samples a huge population. WEDDLE’s 2007 report is based on responses from over 11,500 people. The data were collected between January 1, 2007 and July 31, 2007 at the WEDDLE’s Web-site, www.weddles.com.

Our 2007 survey confirmed some previously reported trends and yielded a couple of interesting surprises. As shown below, the five largest sources of new employees were online job boards, staffing and executive search firms, tips from friends and family members, networking in a business context, and two methods that have been pooh-poohed recently by the cognoscenti of employment: career fairs and newspapers.

The #1 source of employment: answering ads and posting a resume on job boards, reported by 13.22% of respondents;
The #2 source of employment: a call from a headhunter or staffing firm, reported by 11.3% of respondents;
The #3 source of employment: a tip from a friend or family member, reported by 11.1% of respondents;
The #4 source of employment: networking at work or at a business event, reported by 10.5% of respondents;
The #5 source of employment: a virtual tie between career fairs and answering an ad in a newspaper, reported by 5.8% of respondents.

As you can see, these five sources accounted for almost six out of ten (57.7%) of the positions that people took during their last job search.

What were the least helpful sources of employment, as reported by our survey respondents? Beginning with the least effective, they were:

Networking at a social event;
Answering an ad in a publication of their professional association;
Using a social networking site;
Sending a resume directly to an employer; and
Responding to a notice posted in a store.

What can we learn from these results?

First, while social networking sites and social networking, in general, obviously have their benefits, one of them is clearly not finding a job or, by extension, connecting us with viable employment prospects.
Second, while associations serve a number of important functions, many are apparently not meeting the employment needs of their members and, by extension, our requirements in recruiting.
third, many of our own employers aren’t faring much better.

In a War for Talent, such crude recruiting tactics as placing placards in a window are the functional equivalent of using a bow and arrow. Equally as important, the technology we’ve deployed to fight that war-those applicant tracking systems so many of our organizations have purchased-are letting us down. They’ve created a black hole experience out of resume submission that turns off and turns away the best and brightest.

What should we do about these findings? I have the following suggestions:

Devote more time to online or e-networking. This activity enables you to leverage the job seeker’s confidence in networking while capitalizing on the productivity benefits you can achieve online. I’m not suggesting that you forego traditional telephonic and face-to-face networking, but rather that you augment those more labor- and time-intensive methods with the Web’s capacity for efficient mass 1:1 relationship building.
Invest in multimedia advertising. Regardless of what you may have heard about the demise of newspaper advertising, it’s clear that job seekers still turn to that medium as a trusted and useful source of employment. You can capitalize on that view by creating relatively inexpensive “teaser” classified ads that connect job seekers to more fulsome and persuasive job postings online. However, don’t make candidates laboriously search a job database (on your own corporate site or on a commercial job board) to find the opening in which they’re interested. Instead, include an alphanumeric code in your print ad that will return the exact job they want to see and do so without any effort on their part.
Expect more out of your applicant tacking system. Re-read the text that’s included in your system’s auto-responder. If it’s something only a lawyer could love, change it so that it reflects the attributes of your employment brand and delivers the courtesy and respect that applicants deserve. Also check the functionality the system is using to identify the source of candidates. Some of the better systems are now using a form of tagging, but most still rely on simple drop down windows with a list of options for job seekers to select. If that’s what your vendor is providing, make sure its list is up-to-date and that the vendor has an effective way to help you keep it that way.

The WEDDLE’s Source of Employment Survey will be reported here in my newsletter each year in September. We hope it helps you to maximize the return you achieve on your investment of recruiting time, effort and advertising money in the War for the Best Talent.

Thanks for reading,
Peter