5 Key Talent Acquisition Themes Heard in 2007

Jobs2Web enjoyed terrific adoption this year, and along the way I had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of organizations regarding their talent acquisition direction - here are five themes I heard repeatedly:

1. Measure your talent acquisition by source - know your applicant/interview/offer/hire numbers by source, and then check back in six and twelve months to determine retention by source.
2. Don't rely on the applicant to select the correct source -- have your partners auto-tag the source of the candidate when they deliver them to your ATS. This will probably improve your source accuracy by 200-300%.
3. Leverage your cost-per-hire - when you can auto-track by source you can determine your ROI. Be sure to leverage those numbers when you're renegotiating especially your job-board contracts. Which leads to observation 4...
4. Start reducing your job-board spend - I know of several F500 firms have dropped at least one of the big three job boards in the past quarter. Reasons given: increasing subscription prices, rising cost-per-hire, wide applicant: offer rate (e.g. too many candidates to weed through...), and the internal need to source passive or semi-passive candidates vs. only active candidates.
5. Begin tapping the passives and semi-passives using Google, Yahoo, and the other major search engines. The 35 million job-related searches monthly on search engines are done primarily by non-active job-seekers -- just individuals looking around for new career opportunities, but not desperately seeking a new gig (a/k/a a job-board applicant...). If your jobs and job families optimized and visible, you can access this candidate traffic.

2008 will see many more organizations adopt both pay-per-click and organic search engine marketing solutions to offset the falling productivity of job-boards. Those that can measure their applicant flow by source will be able to invest wisely.

Peter Brasket is a co-founder of HotGigs, and leads the Jobs2Web program

Comments

[Nursing RN, BSN]

The big three job boards make up less than 5% of all jobs advertised.

Career sites is one place where the net has failed to make things more efficient.

The problem is most people think the big three have all the jobs.

Well, thank you, for sites like Indeed and Simply Hired. They are the Google of the job search industry.

[Peter Brasket]

Indeed, SimplyHired, Vast, Oodle, and other aggregators can play an important talent acquisition role -- that's why we push Jobs2Web client jobs to these sites. But typically we first optimize the titles and jobs to improve the quality and quantity of job flow.

It's important however to note where these job aggregators get their talent -- and that is the search engines, via both paid and organic clicks.

So if you can get your jobs and job families to appear within Google directly, you can reach the prospective candidates before they're pulled into a job board.

To illustrate for nursing -- run these examples on Google for Jobs2Web client HealthEast (www.minnesota-healthcare-jobs.com):

MN ICU Nurse Jobs - 9th result
MN Clinical Nurse Specialist Jobs - 15th result
Minnesota Clinical Nurse Specialist Jobs - 13th result
Minnesota Certified Nurse Midwife Jobs - 14th result
MN Cardiac Nurse Jobs - 3rd result
MN ER Nurse Jobs - 13th result....and so on

I'd say the Google for the job search industry is Google - it's just a nascent talent acquisition practice.

[Irene]

Dear Blog Owner,

My name is Irene, and I work with the website Real Hospital Jobs:

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I recently found your site and am very interested in exchanging links.

As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us. Please post a
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Title: Hospital Jobs
URL:http://www.realhospitaljobs.com
Description: Search Hospital related jobs from nursing jobs to physicanjobs.

Once you've posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it's on, and I will post it on our site.

Thank you very much,

Irene
realhospitaljobs@gmail.com

[Nurse Jobs]

While many industries are cutting back on the number of workers, nurses remain in demand. At http://nursejobslink.com, there are hundreds of nursing jobs available in all subfields of nursing. RN's, we have you covered!

[Blast free Resume Post]

That's really good tips.I have already joined the community. Although I'm unlikely to get a job through Career Commons since , I will definitely enjoy connecting with fellow jobseekers and with internet and network, there might be interesting opportunities.

[Doctoral Dissertation]

Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!