Efficient candidate sourcing is a major issue that all recruitment agencies, job boards and employers face. Everyone wants to improve their ROIs, but with such high costs and such dominant players taking over the industry, it is one of the biggest struggles in recruitment today.

Job boards are heavily relied upon. Much to recruiters’ and employers’ dismay, they are delivering:

1. A huge quantity of applications - “59% of recruiters said that they don't have the "manpower or time" to sift through all of the submissions that they receive from Job Boards.” – report by Aberdeen Group
   
2. Awful quality - “Less than 10% of Job Board applicants match the qualifications from the job description” –  also in the Aberdeen Group report
   
3. Many duplicate CVs
4. No passive candidates (those who are not actively seeking employment) – due to the nature of the job boards’ incoming traffic. This is not good for recruiters, as the best active candidates will most likely be also speaking with your competitors.

Why is this?

We found that 5 of the UK’s top job boards get between 76% and 90% of their referral traffic from a single source - Indeed (check out our infographic on the ‘truth about job boards’).

…and this is obviously a huge problem, according a survey by Broadbean Technology, recruiters listed "irrelevant response" as the single biggest issue they face in their jobs.

We have calculated that an estimated £442Million of recruiters' time is wasted each year across the UK recruitment industry as a whole.

This is a problem that recruiters, job boards and employers all need to fix.

But how?

1. Go Niche (if you’re not already)

If you run a multi-sector recruitment business, separate your sectors out and build a different network* for each one.  Separate the sectors to different websites and form a community where candidates in this niche can discover new things in their industry, such as news, events, training courses, career advice, general industry advice. You could even consider incorporating a forum where like-minded people can converse and help each other with sector specific concerns or queries. 

2. Spend time adopting a *network approach

Don’t rely on job boards, aggregators (definitely not Indeed!) or any other source that all of your competitors are using to source candidates. Build a team who are dedicated to forming partnerships with organisations in your niche. The idea is to understand where your target candidates are ‘hanging-out’ online (and offline) and get your vacancies onto these channels. Note that most of these people will be passive and not actively looking for work. Bonus!

Through a lot of hard work, you can ensure that your potential reach is much wider than your competitors’. However, this method will result in far fewer applications, which are much more relevant.  The trick is to refine your targeting on an on-going basis. How?

3. Big data

Focus all of your targeting through big data. You’ll need to collect data about your target audience (candidates) at every opportunity, looking at their:

• Demographics
• Online behavior
• Interests

Once you have large data sets which have been analyzed, it will guide you to where the candidates specific to the requirements of each of your different roles are ‘hanging out’ online. This is where you will place your vacancy ad. Continuous analysis & refining is required for this method to prove effective.

Find Out More

If you are a recruiter or employer within engineering and don’t have the time to adopt the methods outlined in this article, get in touch with us. At topEngineer, we take all of this work off your hands and become your network, providing you with a gateway to 5 million engineers and, ultimately, much higher quality applicants to your roles.   

+44 (0)330 055 5850

sales@topengineer.com

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