Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

At some point last week you may have stumbled across a press release from Jobvite, a recruitment application that engages the entire company in the recruiting process. The release talked about Jobvite’s “strong customer momentum” despite the economy and pointed to an increase of 80 percent in their customer base as evidence.

Considering this news, I thought it would be appropriate to solicit former Yahoo! HotJobs head honcho and current Jobvite CEO Dan Finnigan for some advice. We sat down to talk about how companies can reduce their recruiting spend while still maintaining good recruiters and a solid pipeline of candidates during turbulent times.

Finnigan began by saying that most companies who plan poorly won’t be prepared for what’s looming on the horizon.

“The vast majority of companies will be in maintain mode after they make some cutbacks in this budget cycle,” Finnigan said . “At the end of 2009 they’re probably going to up their hiring a little bit, but they’ll still have a wait and see period. Sometime in 2010 they’ll see the turnover is now real but they won’t have half the budgets.”

But 2011, he predicted, will be the year that companies are back to growth hiring mode. In the meantime, many will need to lower the costs of their own internal recruiting effort by getting better (but affordable) recruiters and increasing the number of hires they receive through referral efforts.

Finnigan outlined three ways that companies can reduce their recruiting spend all while maintaining a solid recruiting department: target your sourcing intelligently, don’t overspend, and act like marketer. If you’re going to spend money, he advised, do the things that are free or come at a much lower cost, and take advantage of the way the Internet works. And most importantly, provide a great candidate experience. Here’s his advice in detail:

The recruiting spend is composed of [a company's] own internal recruitment effort. They have technology infrastructure like an ATS, and then they spend money on job advertising and job events. The second category is recruitment agencies, and the third are referrals.

First, companies can increase the number of hires through their referral efforts or agencies. Second, companies should do intelligent marketing-informed targeting of their opportunities to the right audience so that they can whittle down their spend.

The job boards have been great innovators from migrating recruiting from a print world to an online world (and it’s much less expensive), but perhaps a horizontal job board doesn’t make sense anymore. For one there are many effective niche communities. More people are spending time online professionally on web sites and community user groups and blogs. Those are the places to target the right job for that audience. Once you do that you need to measure the effectiveness of it. Most recruiting efforts don’t do a good job at tracking the results of the spend that they have.

Try to find a niche targeted outlet for the advertising of job opportunities as opposed to the easier-to-do but less effective horizontal job boards.

Companies must get very good at optimizing their marketing online for free awareness and free traffic and free leads. That means there are free or low-cost sources of candidates. Optimizing their career job board to be found by search engines is a smart thing to do.

When creating a job description, put in the words that people are going to use when they search search engines. Hopefully the quality will be better if they’re the right words. This is an emerging practice among the smart online recruiters.

Another practice that we strongly believe in here at Jobvite is social networking. On average 29 percent of all hires come from employee referrals and social networking, and that’s now going up. It’s much easier for people to share information online. You can make that number go up by using the right tools and motivating employees.

Finally, many people are going to apply for jobs that may not be the best fit for them because they want to find a job and it’s hard to do so. It’s really important for companies to provide a great candidate experience for all their candidates both online and when they come into the building.

People’s natural instinct [during tough times] is to retreat. I think that’s the biggest mistake a company can make right now. Now is the time for companies to invest in their products and the time for people to invest in their careers, so that when we do come out of this you increase the value of yourself.

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