Download - Engaging Active and Passive Jobseekers
Engaging Active and Passive JobseekersDan Meadows
6th October 2009
• 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
• 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?
• 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
• 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’
Segmenting the market
Segmenting the market
• 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?
• 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’
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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
Questions?