It was bound to happen sooner or later. The massive number of candidate applications has simply overwhelmed those who are tasked with going through those applications to find a reasonable number of candidates to actually interview for a particular position.
According to The Wall Street Journal, recruiters say that while they are beginning to hire again, they’re going about it differently by no longer screening piles of online applications and instead seeking out potential candidates themselves. Many of them say they’re going to focus on sites like Linkedin even before the post an opening to find those candidates that have the expertise a particular position requires.
The decision to scale back their use of online job boards came because the sites generated mostly unqualified leads. Even recruiting agencies are following their own lead. The Journal quotes the vice president of Science Applications International, Kara Yarnot as saying the McLean, Virginia based government contractor says it has been inundated with online applicants and plans to cut the number of job boards it uses this year to six from 15.
She says her firm has asked its 125 recruiters to find candidates for analyst, engineering, and other jobs on professional social networks instead of plowing through piles of submissions to jobsites. She says the goal is to reach candidates earlier, before they're being pursued by the competition.
According to a recent survey from the Corporate Executive Board, a business consulting firm, about one in four (24%) of companies plan to decrease their usage of third-party employment websites and job boards this year. Meanwhile, nearly 80% said they plan to increase their use of job-board alternative methods this year, such as employee referrals and other websites like Facebook or LinkedIn.
The Journal article reports that food services company Sodexo USA, which is owned by Paris-based Sodexo SA, slashed the number of jobs it posts to third-party job boards by more than half since the recession started. The vice president of talent acquisition, Arie Ball, said the number of applications to some executive openings at Sodexo rose more than 300 since the downturn started, but many were unqualified candidates.
'All this extra time'
Ms. Ball told the Journal that recruiters had to “put in all this extra time to read applications but we didn't get benefit from it." She says that now, the company is hiring different types of recruiters who specialize in headhunting, including finding candidates to poach from competitors, rather than those who are good at processing and filtering applications.
The Labor Department says that companies are adapting their plans as they start hiring again after the downturn. Between November 2009 and November 2010, the total number of job openings rose 32 percent.
According to the Corporate Executive Board, job seekers who were reluctant to leave their existing jobs—as well as unemployed workers sitting on the sidelines—have begun casting about for opportunities, too. Between December 2009 and December 2010, recruiters saw a 17 percent increase in applications per opening. This trend has been a boost for job boards, which say they haven't noticed any impact from some companies pulling back. Some of the largest sites do admit that in this new environment, they have to do more to keep customers happy, such as giving job seeking advice.
In the coming months, Monster.com plans to roll out technology that ranks candidates based on how well their applications fit requirements set by the recruiter. Chief global marketing officer Ted Gilvar says the product has been available to some customers since late last year.
Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group told the Journal that it remains concerned that relying too much on job boards could be bad for business. Melissa Mounce, the company's senior vice president of corporate talent acquisition, says the company became concerned that its slow response time to applications was hurting its retail bank's brand. She says that someone who applies for a bank-teller position might also be a customer or potential customer, and they were letting those applications “fall into a black hole."
Ms. Mounce says that PNC has reduced its overall spending on general job boards, such as Monster and CareerBuilder, but still uses niche boards, like Dice.com for tech professionals, when the need arises.
Additionally, the company is currently reorganizing its recruiting staff to better handle the tens of thousands of applications it receives in a given month. She says that Instead of using senior recruiters to filter through the company's applicants, lower-level screeners process them first and only hand off the most-qualified. She adds that a separate set of recruiters actively searches for more experienced candidates who aren't likely to come in through a job board.
