Recruiting in a Downturn

Many organizations feel that recruiting for talent is easier when the economy is struggling than when the economy is booming. When the economy is booming candidates have their choice of opportunities and can write their own ticket. When the economy slows and companies start to lay off, candidates become plentiful. Candidates that were previously passive now become active.

Let's first put things in perspective. Unemployment in the United States, currently at 5.5%, is low compared to the rest of the world. According to the CIA World Factbook, Canada has an unemployment rate that is almost 10% higher(6.0%) and Europe is over 20% higher (6.7%). Even with the current bump up in unemployment, 94.5% of the US is employed. Downturns, historically, have offered a small window where companies gain greater access to recruiting talent.

Companies that are investing in staff while others are downsizing have an opportunity to attract candidates that would not typically be on the market. The challenge is to distinguish between candidates that were let go because companies were cutting under-performers and the solid-performers that were let go as part of a larger scale attrition.

There is a difference between a good candidate and a good employee.... sometimes they overlap, but frequently they do not. Good candidates have their resume prepared, they have it posted on the right boards, they search efficiently and they have practice interviewing. Good employees may not have updated their resume in years and they don't use the job boards effectively or search them as frequently as they should.

Organizations who want to attract good employees have to bridge the gap: they have to use many boards to make sure they capture the few boards that good candidates are on, and they have to maximize exposure to their job to make sure it's seen in the window of time that the good candidates are looking. Maximizing exposure to your position is typically expensive, time consuming and hard to justify in a down economy.

Fortunately companies now have an alternative. YourLeap offers a robust solution and a cost effective price. YourLeap maximizes your exposure to all job boards while saving you both time and money. YourLeap industry experts post your position and search daily on all the major boards and hundreds of niche boards. The results are easy to access by logging in to YourLeap.com and viewing the pre-sorted responses from the over 100,000,000 candidates that are on the job boards they have access to, as well as the hundreds of major and niche boards they post to.

If you are investing in hiring while the economy is slow, it's worthwhile to insure the return on that investment by maximizing your exposure to candidates, and YourLeap offers you that tool.