Still posting your job ads to Indeed or Monster and hoping that the perfect candidate happens to stumble upon them?
This laissez-faire approach might have worked well 10 years ago. Now? You’ll miss the boat if you’re treading water.
The strongest and most competitive business leaders realize that the hiring process is quickly evolving, changing shape and keeping up with the lightning-quick pace of innovation. If you’re relying on traditional job boards to deliver the top talent your business needs, it won’t take long for competitors to usurp your efforts.
Today, we’re taking a look at why these methods have reached their exhaustion point and where the real talent is hanging out instead.
Ready to learn more? Let’s get started.
From Generalized to Niche
When a candidate hops onto a mass job posting site, he or she can search for openings related to “Underwater Basket Weaver” on the same platform as “Data Specialist II.”
This is because sites like these contain hundreds of thousands of openings, with little to no specialization.
For business managers, this means that while it might be easy to advertise an opening this way, you’ll become inundated with applicants who have all kinds of backgrounds, experience, skill sets and qualifications. Sorting through them to find the diamond in the rough can be a full-time task.
Top-tier candidates realize how over-saturated these markets are, and as such, steer clear of them.
Where are they going instead? Most are connecting with premium recruiting agencies who have direct access to business leaders in their niche job market. This allows them to leverage personal networking connections to find them the best, highest-paying roles.
Not everyone will qualify to become a Warehousing and Distribution Manager and that’s excellent news for HR managers who tire of digging through half-relevant resumes. A recruiting agency can help you focus your search on only the candidates who are the best match, avoiding the extra administrative effort.
Appeal to Individualized Interests
Most standard job ads follow the same tired template. They’re devoid of jargon, full of generalizations and leave way too much up to the imagination.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that almost half (42%) of job applicants actually possess the skill requirement that a job advertises. It’s all too easy to miss important details when you’re relying on a job board layout to do the work for you.
On the other hand, partnering with a recruiting agency means you can be as technical as you need to be in your job description, listing the exact industry certifications required and the necessary training components. Then, agents can take advertise those requirements to their select group of high-level candidates.
This allows you to cater to the specific pool of candidates you’re trying to reach.
If you want to hire a senior-level product engineer, you need someone who understands the demand of the job and has the education and experience to fulfill it. You don’t need someone who sorted by “highest to lowest” on a job board and applied to every opening on the first page.
Personalization is Key
It only takes one look at the modern e-commerce landscape to understand that today’s buyer wants personalization at every turn. This extends to job-seekers.
In an era where the job search market is chocked-full of high-tech gadgets that enable instant collaboration, more than one-quarter of applicants would rather attend an in-person interview than use smartphone apps, virtual job fairs or webchats to connect with a potential future employer.
The takeaway? While these tools are innovative and expand collaborative abilities, nothing can take the place of personalized connection.
A recruiting agency can work in the background to make those connections happen. Instead of sorting through tomes of online applicants gathered through a job board site, you can reach out directly to the handful of people who are ideal for your opening.
Achieve a Big-Picture Fit
It’s all too easy to lie on your resume. In fact, 56% of people do it.
Thus, even when you receive technical resumes that seem to line up with the requirements you posted on your job board, it’s impossible to verify their accuracy until you can contact the candidates personally.
The only problem? For every online job listing advertised, hiring managers receive a whopping 200 resumes. By the time you’re able to able to sort through them all and identify the ones that seem to match, any candidate with real qualifications is already working for a competitor.
Let’s say, however, that you were able to isolate the top few in a relatively quick manner.
If you decide to hire from a job ad alone, it’s next to impossible to gauge a candidate’s soft skills and personality. They can look great on paper, sound good on the phone and shine in an interview, but the real test will come when they join your team.
An employee could work in your office for weeks before you can gauge whether or not he or she is a good fit for your company culture. It’s difficult to request those details in a job template or discern them in a 30-minute interview.
A quality recruiting agency like ours has processes in place to help ensure that a candidate doesn’t just fit your technical requirements, but also has the personality, talents, and goals that align with yours.
A successful placement hinges on finding employees who are a 360-degree fit for your organization. Top-notch credentials mean nothing if an employee isn’t a team player or refuses to communicate. These are details that a job board alone can’t reveal.
Quicker Access to Top Talent
Your recruitment dollars are valuable. Don’t toss them out the window by investing on job board listings that require your HR team to work overtime without really going anywhere.
Relying on a job board might give you plenty of options, but a majority will be dead-end roads. This is especially cumbersome if you have a time-sensitive job requirement.
There are many scenarios in which you might need a new hire to start yesterday.
A client is growing frustrated with the slow pace of a project. You took on a new client and need more hands on deck for support. You’re getting ready to expand to a new location and want to get it up and running as soon as possible.
Regardless of the reason, you don’t have time to weed through resumes, conduct hours of interviews or call a thousand references.
A recruiting agency can streamline the entire process, putting you in touch with the candidates that are worthy of your attention. As a result, you’re able to cut through the stacks of paperwork and hours of busywork, filling your urgent role quicker.
Understanding Niche Industries
Your HR team works hard and has enough on its plate. Asking those employees to post job openings on career boards can prove challenging, especially if the requirements are for a highly technical, niche role.
Despite their best efforts, your HR managers might not understand the specific language to use when explaining role requirements.
For instance, you might only be interested in senior networking professionals who carry a CCIE or CCNA certification. Or, you might require your sales teams to have experience with Microsoft CRM or Oracle ERP.
These are niche-specific terms that an HR employee might miss when describing the position on a job board. This is especially the case if they rely on a template to do most of the work for them.
Recruiting agencies have deep experience in the niches they focus on, allowing them to have a better understanding of what’s required than most. You’ll have an agent on your side with immediate access to a pool of candidates that meet your exact needs, no matter how specific or technical they are.
Skip the Job Ads and Find the Talent You Need
No one ever got very far by holding tight to the past.
If you’re still relying on outdated (soon to become antiquated) job ads to get the word out about your vacant positions, it’s time to overhaul that strategy for a more future-focused one.
When you need to find qualified candidates quickly, you need to go straight to the source, not circumvent it with wordy postings and half-hearted applicants.
That’s where we come in.
We’re a recruitment agency dedicated to matching employers and job-seekers in the engineering, manufacturing, sales, and supply chain sectors. We’ll call upon our team of experienced agents and leverage our proprietary recruiting process to find the right people to join your team.
Contact us today to learn more and take a giant leap ahead.
