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.

Which Job Boards Work Best for Recruiting? All of them.

All the major job boards are not created equal. They attract different candidates, in different ways and at different times. The only way you are sure to capture all the available candidates on the net is to use all the major and niche boards; use them all ways, by posting and searching; and use them all the time, by searching daily.

Until now companies have had to choose job boards, hope they chose correctly, and then find the time to properly utilize them.

YourLeap offers the ideal solution. YourLeap accesses all the major job boards, and hundreds of minor ones. YourLeap experts post your job and search daily for you. Companies no longer need to pick the right boards, or spend their limited time searching through them. YourLeap does the heavy lifting for you. YourLeap posts your job, searches over 300 resume databases, contacts the top matches, and has industry experts sort through all the responding results.

One major board may have an aggressive campaign one month and another board may attract more candidates the very next. YourLeap takes the guess work and the frustration out of the equation for you. Monster.com powers the New York Times job board and Dice.com attracts more passive, technology specific candidates. Careerbuilder has an affiliation with MSN.com and Hotjobs is owned by Yahoo. Do you want to guess browsing behavior when you need specific candidates quickly?

It is clear, there is no single board solution for all your jobs, but there is a single source solution, YourLeap.com. YourLeap covers all the job boards, in all ways, and all the time.

The Future of Recruiting

There are misconceptions of what recruiting may look like in the future. The one I hear most often is video resumes will be the standard. A close second is that advancing technology will take place of recruiters soon. Lets take a minute to dispel these.

What is it that an EEO, OFCCP, ADA compliant organization can see in a video that they can not see in a text resume? What can they recognize in a video screening that they can not from a phone screening? Unless you feel we, as a country, will become significantly less litigious, I wouldn't expect videos to replace resumes anytime soon.

Technology has advanced greatly over the past decade, but has it made finding talent easier? Many will argue that technology has made things more difficult to find talent. There are more resumes on an ever increasing amount of job boards. Passive candidates are more difficult to find, and ultra active candidates are using white type (putting white words on a white background) to help the ranking of their resume.
We live in a talent economy, those organizations with the best talent fare best. If and when Google comes up with an ideal candidate algorithm (even they use recruiters now), will they let Microsoft, Yahoo or other competitors access this or would they keep it for competitive purposes?

One trend that is gaining traction are job board aggregators, such as indeed.com and juju.com. Organizations searching for talent have a tougher challenge, when they pay to increase job board access, they increase the amount of time to post jobs, search resumes and contact candidates. One company that is emerging as a hybrid solution is YourLeap.com. YourLeap uses it's access to all the major job boards and hundreds of minor ones, to locate, contact, and screen through the clutter for companies. The candidates that have expressed interest are rated in a simple, and easy to access method.

Take the Work out of Recruiting

Recruiting and Sourcing, what's the difference? Large recruiting organizations and the best agencies know.

Recruiting is an art, it's identifying the right prospect, attracting them, and closing them. Not much different from sales, in fact, the best organizations view it as selling your company. Recruiting is the most valuable function of your company. Before you argue that it's sales or senior management, ask yourself how you find and attract your top sales people and managers: you recruit them.

Sourcing is a commodity. Sourcing is not recruiting, sourcing is lead generation and qualification. Sourcing done poorly, takes up time that should be spent with hiring managers and pre-qualified candidates. Sourcing, done properly, gives recruiters time to discuss strategy with hiring managers and feeds a pipeline of qualified candidates for recruiters to attract.

Most companies don't have the access to all the major job boards or the time to screen through all the resumes they may get from them. Fortunately there is a cost effective solution that takes the work out of recruiting, YourLeap.com. YourLeap gives your recruiters time to recruit. With access to all the major job boards and hundreds of minor boards, YourLeap experts post, search and filter through over 100 million resumes and deliver the results in a sorted, easy to access format.