Transcript
Page 1: Engaging Active and Passive Jobseekers

Engaging Active and Passive JobseekersDan Meadows

6th October 2009

Page 2: Engaging Active and Passive Jobseekers

• Who are active and passive jobseekers?

• An overview of the predominant engagement activities within online recruitment

• The balance between active and passive engagement activities

• The net impact of these activities on the state of the online recruitment industry

• What opportunities exist?

• Key considerations in getting online recruitment right

• What changes are happening in the industry

• Questions

Outline

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• Individuals who are currently seeking an employment opportunity

• Consistently post their CV on job boards, apply to job listings and keep their online profiles up-to-date

• The low hanging fruit: known to interested, relatively flexible and willing to negotiate

• Main issue: may lack focus or are insufficiently qualified, leading to high volumes of unsuitable applications

Who are the ‘active’ jobseekers?

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• Already gainfully employed, not currently searching for a job

• Focussed on their long term career, selective about their next role

• Sought after skills and experience

• Often more loyal and stable, so will stay in a job for longer

• The recruiter’s challenge: dislodge them from their current position

• Predominantly headhunting, but head-hunters only cover around 10% of the passive market

• Moving a candidate from passive to active can be time consuming, costly and ultimately unsuccessful

• Higher expectations and demands have to be accommodated

The ‘passive’ jobseekers

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• The middle ground between active and passive

• Employed, but keep their eyes and ears open to the right opportunity

• Possible reasons for a change: greater responsibilities, enhance their CV, enhance their earnings, role with a competitor

• Often difficult to determine whether they have a solid interest, i.e. the point at which they will switch from passive to active

Degrees of ‘passive’

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Segmenting the market

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Segmenting the market

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• Generalist job boards – Monster, TotalJobs, Jobsite

• B2B publishers – RBI, Centaur, Haymarket

• Media companies/newspapers – national and regional

• Social networks - LinkedIn

• Member organisations/niche communities

• Recruitment companies – Reed.co.uk, Hays, Michael Page

• Head-hunters/executive search

• Larger corporates

Online recruitment: who competes to engage the jobseeker?

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• Listings on job boards

• Search engines – both organic and paid search

• Job aggregators – Workhound, Workcircle etc.

• Job alerts by email

• Email marketing campaigns

• Social networks: postings on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Jobseeker engagement: online channels and methods

• Jobs widgets and Adsense: contextual job advertising to relevant audiences

• CV search & match databases

• Strategic search: online CVs, blogs, corporate sites etc. using boolean techniques and filters

• ‘Social recruiting’

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Jobseeker engagement: online channels and methods

Job board listings

Search engines (organic & paid)

Aggregators

Jobs by email

Email marketing campaigns

Twitter job feeds

Contextual job ads

CV databaseStrategic search

Social recruiting

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• Geared-up to focus on driving application volume rather than quality

• Extremely high competition for search engine traffic and large numbers of job aggregators, all trying to differentiate themselves

• Cost of online job advertising has been driven down considerably

• Emergence of yet more engagement distribution channels (e.g. Twitter) compounds the issue

• Downward spiral fuelled by Recruitment companies using cheap multi-posting options

Net result: the reputation of generalist online recruitment is worsening

Competition for active jobseekers: the impact on the generalists

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• The same jobs appear everywhere

• The quality of job ads can be extremely poor, especially from recruitment companies

• Common complaint: ‘I don’t get a response to my job applications’

• Fire and forget: less care taken over application submission, less crafting applications to suit the role

• Many are pushed to adopt a scatter-gun approach

• A significant proportion of jobseekers are becoming stuck with an increasingly smaller no. of generalist services

The impact on the jobseeker

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• Extremely high volumes of applications received: difficult and costly to manage

• Candidates without the right skills, experience and qualifications apply

• Choice of recruitment channel becomes less easy to make with growing disillusionment in generalist online recruitment services

• Exacerbated by the current economic climate

• Additional passive impact: good candidates become less willing to explore different opportunities in a downturn, leading to skills shortages

How recruiters are affected

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• Niche audiences often yield high quality candidates, so there is a natural demand from recruiters

• Already demonstrated by the strategic search activities of professional recruiters (and some corporates)

• Research of user behaviour shows that skilled candidates would generally prefer a smaller number of relevant opportunities than the experience currently offered by generalists

• Jobseekers want to feel loved: far easier to achieve through a trusted organisation

With more than 70% jobseeking now online, the niche approach is a compelling alternative

A big opportunity: driving quality through the niche

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• Build your job board on a taxonomy, search and browse that fits with how your audience thinks

• Focus on SEO around well-researched niche phrases and above all avoid the generalist

• Develop a user experience that encourages sign-up to regular communications (JBEs, e-marketing), as these typically deliver a much better conversion than search & browse

Considerations: engagement through niche job board services

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• Encourage quality job advertising to provide clear information to the jobseeker, through well-crafted (self-service) job posting systems: i.e. the recruiter experience is just as key

• Wrap the technology in a user experience that instils confidence, trust and sells the benefits

Market the service as premium offering

Considerations: engagement through niche job board services

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• Give both active and passive jobseekers the means to proactively present their CV to potential employers

• Quality is driven by assuring candidate privacy and enabling them to stay in control

• Strike the right balance between rich information capture and ease of upload

• Provide mechanisms that prompt candidates to keep their information up-to-date

Considerations: engagement through CV database services

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• Focus on providing CV search & match tools that fit with the specific needs of recruiters within your niche

• Drive targeted response to job ads by marketing to well-defined segments of your db

Use all of the above to drive the high quality CV provision at a premium price

Considerations: engagement through CV database services

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• Generalists will increasingly lose out to niche audience sites at the quality end of the candidate spectrum

• Emerging niche job boards with a ready-made audience will face significantly lower attraction costs

• The generalists will be forced to invest in moving up the recruitment food chain in order to provide higher quality services to the employer

• Jobseeker attraction channels (e.g. social networks) will come and go: ‘hubs and spokes’

• Employers will re-assess their options as alternative, higher quality, niche services emerge

• A quality user experience will be the central theme

The online recruitment market is shifting

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Questions?


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