Where do your best candidates come from?
That’s the million-dollar question that the AIM Group, experts in online media revenue, wanted to know for their annual Recruitment Advertising 2009 survey. They asked 75 recruiters, HR professionals, managers, and recruitment agents where they are spending their limited ad budgets to find out what is and isn’t working for them.
The results, although at times predictable considering the praise heaped upon hugely popular (and free) social media sites, were surprising.
Recruiters in the U.S., U.K. and Canada gave social and professional networking platforms and niche job sites the highest marks for bringing in quality candidates, supporting empirical evidence that recruiters are funneling more effort into these services. According to the report, when asked to rate alternative recruiting methods, networks and niches tied with 16% of respondents saying that both were great for bringing in quality candidates. No other recruiting methods came close in the “great” ratings.
Recruiters noted the two best networks for recruitment activity are Facebook and LinkedIn, with Twitter closing in fast. This is not surprising considering that Facebook is like a giant candidate playground for recruiters, 175 million potential applicants strong, while LinkedIn picks up about one new user per second. And both, for the most part, are free.
With regards to job boards, it’s clear that the general job sites are falling out of favor with recruiters, with only 3% reporting they got great applicants there. The majority of recruiters (about 72%) told AIM that job sites of all shapes and sizes generated a mix of poor and good applicants. But don’t count them out just yet, even with those free social media sites becoming so pervasive. Fifty-seven percent of recruiters said they were satisfied with the job boards’ performance.
So what job board received the most accolades? That would be Dice, the IT-jobs portal, which garnered about 29% of the voters’ approval. Monster came in second with 26.5%, and CareerBuilder came in third with 22% of the votes. Surprisingly, aggregators like Indeed and Simply Hired were not picked as top-tier portals, although both have enjoyed substantial surges in traffic recently.
The AIM Group also wanted to know how these recruiters gauge success from these tools and sites. When it comes to trackable stats, recruiters said they pay attention to (in order of importance) the number of hires (44%), retention rates after six months, number of resumes received, number of offers extended, and number of interviews.
What was the most surprising to me is not where recruiters are recruiting now, but where they AREN’T recruiting. A whopping 34% of recruiters polled said they haven’t tried free sites like Craigslist or Kijiji. Forty-one percent claim they have yet to use SEM, and 83% said they haven’t given mobile recruiting a chance yet. Video also remains a tricky and elusive tool to master, because only 9% of recruiters said they’ve used YouTube to recruit, and about 18% reported trying other online video services with mixed results.
One glaring omission from the report was print. AIM said that with so many digital choices, the question of print spending is no longer relevant and was dropped from the survey. Recruitment classifieds earned about $2.2 billion in 2008. While this sounds like a lot of money, it’s still $1.6 billion less than the year before.
If you’re selling advertising, the AIM Group has some great advice. Your goal here should be selling service and solutions. They point out evidence that a new mindset is shaping, one in which companies are labeling themselves as recruitment-services providers, not just ad-takers. These companies are leaning towards more of a partnership approach with recruiters, a trend that AIM applauds.
The rest of the report talks about what the Big 3 have planned in terms of new rollouts, why Adicio’s CareerCast portal is enjoying so much success, Jobvite’s innovative approach to hiring, Twitter and semantic search, newspapers dipping into niche sites and job aggregators, and why Monster isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The current recruitment landscape in over 20 countries is also well-documented, along with what recruiters, ad publishers, and agencies need to know to survive and thrive in this fluid market.
*****
AIM, which is made up of consultants who are experts in online media revenue, typically does excellent work, and this analysis does not disappoint. For the full report, the AIM Group has agreed to offer a discount for Cheezhead readers. You can download it here with the discount. I can say with certainty that whether you are a recruiter, an industry blogger, a jobboarder, or you’re embedded in the ad business, this report is a wealth of information and is worth the cost.
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May 14th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Vanessa,
Great post, and great analysis.
Thanks for doing such as great job of reviewing the information and making it easy to understand and digest in our market.
Great Job!
Jonathan
May 14th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Hi Vanessa, great article on showing social media is now becoming the new trend in recruitment. It’s also a great article for me to show as proof to skeptics as well. =D A couple thoughts:
1. You mentioned Facebook has a population of 175 million. It’s actually 200 million. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=72353897130
2. I noticed MySpace wasn’t mentioned in AIM Group’s report. Did AIM Group mention anything about them? It makes me wonder as MySpace is, I think, #2 most populated social networking website.
Keep them great articles coming.
May 14th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
This is a great summary of what sounds like an imperative report to check out. I’m curious as to the tracking process on the recruiter’s side. When they refer to ranking success by the number of hires, I wonder if the recruiters surveyed still rely on dropdown menus or have started implementing tracking devises to take out the guess work. Interesting information, thanks for sharing!
May 14th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Linkedin as a tool, I get – professional, designed for networking and related opportunites.
Facebook for recruiting? I don’t get it..a bunch of people “throwing sheep’ at each other, posting pictures and trying to be funny? Crap for recruiting.
May 14th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Great Article. I’m really surprised that a whopping 34% of recruiters haven’t tried Craigslist. Craigslist seems like a great way to pull in local talent. Perhaps once the buzz of facebook and twitter die down people will return to Craigslist.
May 15th, 2009 at 4:00 am
Did I read that correct? The survey was only 75 recruiters? Did anyone else think that was a pretty low sample size?
May 15th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Did AIM’s survey gruop include corporate recruiters? If yes, is there any way to know what percentage of the responses were from corporate?
I’d be most interested to know.
Thnx
MG
May 15th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Craigslist….hmmmm with the latest bad press that Craigslist has gotten it shouldn’t be surpising that companies are not willing to take the chance of a possible association with the online classified product. Not to mention you get what you pay for with this service it’s free ot next to free and not very specific so…..you can connect the dots and see it’s more trouble then its worth. The unemployment numbers are so high its not suprising that niche sites are on the rise as people go where they can be accommodated. For instance if I am a older job seeker I am probably going to visit a job board that targets me…such as wiserworker.com.
May 15th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Great article…we have a lot of educating to do.
I’m curious if the stats were different for east coast/south/ west coast companies….I see pockets of the nation still just post and praying and other pockets with blown out recruitment plans utlizing multiple tools/advertising and Sourcing….
May 15th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Big job boards are going the same way as the newspapers and dinosaurs. They do not deliver on their promise of quality candidates. I have hired more people from networking through LinkedIn and Craigslist than from Monster, CareerBuilder and hot jobs combined at a fraction of the cost. The big job boards are for lazy recruiters that hire mediocre talent. The most laughable of them all is Simply Hire.
May 15th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Hey DG…Its Simplyhired and they are not a job board.
May 18th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Great post, one of your stats that has fallen completely contrary to our results is the success rate for DICE. We rate it a very distant 3rd in the “big board” rankings, and have found significant candidate overlap with Monster and CareerBuilder; with many of the remaining candidates requiring visa sponsorship.
I am not at all surprised by your stats regarding recruitment advertising spend for 2010.
Can you provide any detail regarding the industry segmentation of your survey sample?
May 18th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Why were sites like http://www.OneWire.com not included? This in my opinion is the future of hiring as it is more of a matching engine with an ATS backend for companies.
Linkedin is a nice tool but does not really seem to offer flexibility and i am not sure why anyone would consider Facebook a hiring tool. I am curious as to the value Twitter can provide for hiring.
May 18th, 2009 at 10:53 am
I’d like someone to respond to Downtown’s comment about facebook for recruiting. I totally agree that there is nothing there. It is insanely slow. You have to be friends with someone to see their profile. The content for most people isn’t really relevant to their recruitability. If you do a skills search, you get back garbage. I can’t imagine that Facebook is a recruiting tool, but I suppose it might be a fun place to surf while you’re waiting for candidates to apply to the jobs you posted on all the boards.
Can someone please explain how I would use Facebook to recruit someone skilled like a software developer or a pediatric nurse?
May 18th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Blake – Glad you noticed the train has jumped the track with the idea that you can recruit with twitter or facebook…dont expect anyone to be able to explain this silliness….just know it all the buzz right now. I speak with employers all day and they are as confused as you and I are.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Blake – great commercial from IBM…kinda sums it up – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCHKPYHuhA
May 19th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Stick a fork in ‘em. Job boards are dead. For a product that produces, at best, 12% of hires and eats up the bulk of a recruiting budget, job boards have outlived their usefulness. As I wrote recently (http://undergroundjobnetwork.com/?p=487), the boards have become a gaping black hole that serves neither job seekers nor the companies looking to hire them.