Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

During a presentation at ERE Expo by Recruiting Consultant Michael Marlatt called, “The Future of Recruiting is in the Cloud,” a new term was introduced into the conversation.

Marlatt brought up a new breed of media consumers called “media snackers,” or people who have been bombarded with media tools like social networks, microblogs, and media aggregators, and then acquire “Web 2.0 Attention Deficit Disorder.”

“We’re so overwhelmed, we don’t take the time anymore to read blogs like we did three years ago,” Marlatt said. “Anyone who actually blogs can look at their analytics and see the level of traffic vs. a year ago. The attention span of most users is waning. People are consuming information in small bits and choose how they want it when they want it. It’s about micromedia, not social media.”

These media snackers are exactly why Marlatt points to putting your recruiting platforms “in the cloud,” not on your desktop, where they can be accessed at any point on the planet with one device (laptop, mobile phone, etc) to reach these consumers who can be found all over the web.

He explained that this cloud equals freedom to the professional recruiter because it enables them to source anytime they want without any barriers and to synchronize all of their sourcing applications utilizing new tools to make their lives a heck of a lot easier. And it also gives them a leg-up on finding the candidates that are no longer loyal to a single platform or social network.

“This concept is impacting all of us,” he said. “You can no longer capture their attention with one platform to go out there and find your candidates. This generation is evolving and gravitating. The cloud is changing our world.”

To drive the point home, Marlatt offered up job board statistics as evidence that job seekers are looking for different means of representation.

“No offense to you, Eric,” Marlatt said to a Monster rep in the crowd. “But job boards are waning. Statistics show that. In the past 3 years, CareerBuilder and Monster have seen a decline. Maybe because people are looking at other alternatives to networking, like using VisualCV and LinkedIn. So the question is, are you or are you still using technology from three years ago?”

It’s a question that should become a direct initiative to address at many companies who are struggling to find top talent, especially those who have recruited conservatively in the past by narrowing job search tools down to a phone and a couple of postings on one of the Big 3. It’s simply not going to cut it anymore.

“Today’s recruiting landscape has changed,” Marlatt said. “In the early days, it was about, let’s do a search out there, and that’s still important because we need to know how to search. But searching is only one part of it. It’s one piece. Recruiting has moved to the cloud. And if you take away anything from this presentation, remember this: the cloud equals freedom.”

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