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:
- 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.
- 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%.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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
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