Top 4 Ways Recruiters Will Find Talent in 2016: Jennifer McClure

This weel Jennifer McClure posted an article about the top 4 ways recruiters will find talent next year. The first thing she listed was job postings. (read her post to see the other three)

Does that surprise you? In Jennifer’s own words:

“Despite the neverending parade of new and shiny tools that vie for our attention, the reality is that posting jobs online is still one of the most effective strategies in a recruiter’s arsenal.”

The reason that is interesting to me is because from personal experience, and from what I’ve heard from JibberJobber users, and people in my audiences across the U.S., job boards are super, duper innefective. Want some numbers on this? If you want to get depressed about the ineffectiveness of job boards, check out this 2012 post: Job Board Statistics Revealed and Untangled by Nick Corcodilos (Ask the Headhunter)

But, that doesn’t stop companies from posting to job boards, and job seekers from using them. I recently read that employers pay $5,000,000,000 a year (that is, $5B) to post jobs on job boards. That’s a massive amount of money that has a 3% impact on hiring (number is debatable, read the link above, with Nick).

Jennifer later says that from job postings you get “lots of applications, but only a few qualified candidates.” I was talking with a recruiter recently who said his company gets about 10,000 applicants each month, and easily 80% of them are NOT QUALIFIED.

I’m not talking about not a good fit for the company, but simply NOT QUALIFIED.  Not able to do the stuff mentioned in the job description.  That is 8,000 applications that are discarded right off the bat.

Bottom line? Lots of money will still be spent on job boards.

And, the job search process is still broken, and job postings plays a big part in the brokenness.

The gazillion dollar question is, what is the solution?  I’ve heard a lot of entrepreneurs come up with ideas to fix this problem, but almost every single one of them have been too small, too focused on one part of the problem, or too fragmented.  I don’t see a good solution for a long, long time.  But I know there are some really smart people out there working on cool ideas.