Last week, I went on a sales call. Not unusual, except that sometimes you meet a person who changes your perspective, or confirms that your strategy is right-on. This was one such meeting. I was meeting someone who has been a JobCircle job board client and career fair participant for at least 5 years. This client is a large IT security & availability services firm, located in the Philadelphia area.
“The only reason I’m meeting with you is because you took the time to respond to my comments about your job fair”, she said. Deb, the Staffing and Recruiting Manager, was a very busy woman- overseeing a team of recruiters who are constantly working to fill senior level IT & business analysis positions – over 400 a year.
Deb’s staff had recently participated in one of our job fairs, and had taken notice of the large amount of staffing and placement firms that were in attendance, and had taken the time to provide feedback about her concerns regarding the growing number of staffing firms, headhunters, and 3rd party recruiting firms at job fairs. I fielded the feedback, and we started a dialog via email about recruiting in general – she then invited us to come and meet with her.
As we talked, I could tell that she was a smart woman, well versed in the recruiting space. She’d been around the block a while, and had a real sense of the various changes happening in the market – she was one of our clients who actually “gets it.” It made me step back and think. On blogs like this one and many others, there is so much hype out there. Discussions about the use of social networking for employment - focusing on the long tail reach of recruiting through blogs – who’s the top search result for the keyword “jobs” - the technological wonders of creating Life Charts and other jobseeker profiles designed to reduce recruiter resume clutter – and all the experts daily touting the demise of the job board.
In a very candid conversation with a real hiring manager who’s got a heavy workload, I got the sense that she really had her pulse on what she thinks works and doesn’t work. Here are some of her comments:
- Social networking for employment really doesn’t work. No one wants to be a part of a what’s viewed as a loser network; to be unemployed for any length of time may indicate that one’s skills are outdated or they have other issues. She stated that she thinks that Linked-in is nothing more than a lead generation tool for sales people, or a contest to see how popular you are. “Am I really going to pay someone $50K a year to build a myspace page, spam members to build a friends list, post ads on Linked In, create a Facebook flyer, search through thousands of blog rants, perhaps only to yield one to two hires per year?” She doesn’t think so. She needs to concentrate her people on where the volume is – job boards, job fairs, her corporate web site, and private-label open houses.
- Video stinks as a tool for getting a job. Yea, everyone wants to be jumping on the YouTube bandwagon, but if you’re a jobseeker and good at what you do, you don’t need a Youtube video to sell yourself – your resume and your skills are all you need. Is it the cool factor for a job board to tout that they offer videos of jobseekers? I guess, but after about watching 74 videos, it becomes pretty uncool pretty fast – not to mention time-consuming. Corporate branding via video has viability, and smart companies will take advantage of the inexpensive tools to build brand and create a 45 second online commercial – the cool thing about today’s technology is you don’t need to spend $25K for a recruitment ad agency to build it for you.
- Job Boards still have good long-term viability. There are a lot of crappy boards out there, but if you find a good one – one that has real traffic, real jobseekers, and has a niche – you can still find an excellent ROI. A mix of national, national niche, and regional job boards in your toolbox can go a long way to helping you generate good hiring leads. A vibrant & fresh resume database and a real online presence are important buying criteria. Sites like Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast are helping employers find out which job boards really get the traffic. The days of just posting a job and hoping people will apply is long gone.
- Job Boards need to move up the value chain. Employment sites need to provide products that move further up the RPO value chain and become more than just a job board. They need to focus on becoming a partner to their clients, and focus on connecting jobseekers and employers, no matter what the medium may be. The traditional resume search and posting model still has very strong viability, but clients want to see enhancements on those models, within a reasonable level and with easy adoption into existing business practices.
- Paying placement or agency fees are to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. This client says working with agencies can be a issue, because many of the resumes submitted are candidates that were already in the job board they are paying a subscription to. This causes duplication, and it means that the sourcers could have done a better job in finding the candidates themselves. Who wants to pay a fee on candidates that they already owned?
I think sometimes in our industry we get so caught up in the newest technology, the most traffic, the greatest gizmo, the coolest design – and we forget that there are real people with real hiring needs. Our meeting with Deb last week helped me to realize that at the end of the day, customers just want to make hires as quickly, easily, and inexpensively as possible. We need to focus on building tools and methods that will help them do this. In other words, get back to basics.
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