The 2008 Recruiting Landscape

Late December, the time of the year when we step back from the day-to-day bustle to reconnect with family and friends, and reflect on how far we’ve come over the past year. And, it's a time to look forward, to consider what the New Year will bring and how companies will face the changing recruiting landscape.

Last year at this time, we noted a continued strong growth in online recruiting, coupled with an outburst of creative sourcing techniques. Companies and associations were launching niche job boards almost daily and recruiters were starting to test the social networking waters. A few recruiters, including ZoomInfo’s own Martin Burns, were beginning to see the potential of blogging and other “Web 2.0” tools as a means of attracting candidates and building an employment brand.

And the situation today? At HR conferences, in conversations with recruiting thought leaders, and in the blogosphere, the issue of the day is how companies can develop passive candidate recruiting expertise to meet the business challenges of the next several years. Why the increasing interest in identifying, selecting, reaching out to and nurturing potential employees? Several trends are pushing passive candidate recruiting skills to the forefront:

Workforce planning: With 2008 job reqs just around the corner, recruiters are bracing for the storm. And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security retirement benefits in 2008, the time for action is now. More and more companies are preparing for peaks and troughs in hiring by developing structured workforce plans, including succession planning for key roles, candidate pipelines for other roles, and candidate nurturing programs.

Decrease in math and science graduates: Where do companies turn when universities aren’t producing enough technical workers? 2007 saw a huge increase in efforts to source and court candidates with science and technology backgrounds, especially those with experience at competitors or in related industries.

Global competition for higher productivity: Like it or not, companies are competing for markets, resources and contracts on a global basis. In this hypercompetitive environment, companies with the most productive workforces come out on top. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Q3 productivity growth exceeded every quarter since 2003. Who’s on the front lines of the battle for the best workforce? That’s right, it’s the recruiters! And savvy recruiters know that the best hires come from candidates whose web presence speaks to their contributions to their companies’ success – not those who are likely to respond to a job ad.

Social network frustration: Early adopters have pioneered mining social networking sites, but at what cost? Managing identities and searching across a fragmented network spread out over several sites are inefficient processes at best. These usability issues have caused some frustration among early adopters and deterred many mainstream recruiters from embracing social networking.

What does it all add up to?  For corporate recruiting, 2008 will be the year that passive candidate recruiting crosses the chasm*, moving beyond the innovators and early adopters and into the mainstream.  But it will not be without some bumps in the road.  As search firms have long known, passive candidate recruiting is a major commitment, not something that can be implemented overnight.  The companies that will achieve the most success are those that take a holistic approach to developing a strategy and rollout plan that consider the roles, skills, processes, tools and training that are needed versus just adding more tasks to already over-burdened recruiting teams.

Within search firms and corporate recruiting departments, recruiters will also find their role as marketers increasing. Career websites, job ads, events and media relations all offer opportunities to position their firms or companies favorably in the minds of potential candidates. Candidate nurturing will be particularly influenced by marketing practices. More recruiters will begin to use newsletters and mass customized emails to keep in touch with candidates and manage their pipelines. Open rates, clickthrough rates, A/B testing and text optimization are all measures that recruiters will need to become comfortable with in 2008 to differentiate themselves from the competition.  As a result of this marketing-based approach, recruiters will begin to expect more robust integration between their ATS and CRM systems and other sourcing tools.

In addition to my predictions, we asked some of the recruiting community’s leaders to provide their insights on the 2008 recruiting landscape. This time next year, I look forward to seeing how we helped you master 2008’s changing recruiting environment.

Jonathan Stern, ZoomInfo’s CEO
Jonathan sees the Internet as a great source of information about people, with more and more content coming online every day. However, the most valuable information will continue to be hidden in unstructured sources. As the demand for passive candidates increases, the most desirable candidates will be those employees presenting at conferences, participating in industry committees and think tanks, sitting on industry association or chapter boards or writing professional articles and blogs. All this information will be available but hard to find because it is not aggregated and organized in meaningful ways. Tools for organizing the information and making it easily accessible can help recruiters ferret out these high-quality candidates at the beginning of their searches. 

Additionally, vetting out candidates will continue to be as important as identifying them in the first place, and being able to check back door references can save time, expedite the process and result in a better hire. Such references are likely to be peers who worked at same companies or colleagues at professional organizations. Tools like social networking sites or sophisticated search technologies can help identify individual who might be invaluable in shedding light on the candidate.

Shally Steckerl, Chief CyberSleuth, JobMachine.net
Shally’s 2007 predictions were 100% actionable in that people who followed his advice ended up ahead of the curve, so when he told us he sees passive candidate recruiting surging in 2008, we listened. Shally expects recruiters to rely less on job postings to find the good candidates, and more on direct sourcing, with more recruiters proactively eliciting referrals.

Crucial to this development is more integration of social networking sites so recruiters don't have to maintain dozens of online personalities. This helps recruiters manage their personal branding so they can stand out and be found, trusted and seen by their audience.

Shally predicts a number of changes in recruiting strategy, including more engagement of a talent pipeline and less reliance on an actual requisition before recruitment begins. Better and more targeted campaign management tying initial email contact with follow up calls and other communication vehicles will help recruiters systematically nurture their pipelines. This includes better contact management designed into recruitment tools.

Lou Adler, President, The Adler Group
Lou was spot on last year with his predictions of top performers using compelling and targeted advertising to dramatically increase response rates, and increased use of search engine optimization techniques to drive traffic to a company’s career site.

This year Lou predicts the growing use of third-party recruiter networks to find top people quickly at a reduced fee. By posting jobs on a network site, third party recruiters can increase the quality of candidates for their job orders by turning to recruiters who have good candidates, but no place to put them – effectively geometrically enlarging their candidate pools with little investment in additional recruiting.

Lou also predicts that more companies will redesign their recruiting approaches to more accurately reflect the way people look for work. The traditional requisition-driven approach to finding candidates is counter to the way top performers look for work: while they do look online, they use niche sites or conduct an industry-wide search for the strongest companies, and then look for jobs within these companies. Companies need to try new things to attract the best people. Some ideas will work, some won’t. The one constant that will remain, though is the idea that recruiting the best people requires great jobs and great careers. Posting traditional boring job descriptions won’t recruit many good people. Lou guarantees that this prediction will come true.

Gerry Crispin, CareerXroads
Gerry foresees an explosion in affinity-specific social media applications as a means for people to connect, communicate, and collaborate. The successful adoption of these specialty networks by large numbers of passive candidates will overshadow their more public cousins (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) and hasten the long-term disintermediation of traditional job boards.

Gerry additionally expects companies to add corporate transparency to the tools they use to compete for top talent. This will bring about a substantial increase in visibility of employee demographics, movement (transfers and promotions between divisions), external sources of hire for specific positions, and benefits usage by employee groups -- allowing prospects to better research potential employers.

Some companies will go even further in empowering candidates: A handful of companies will bolt a new style of simulation, testing and assessment capability onto their online application process and promise feedback to prospects who participate in the screening. This commitment to two-way communication will resonate with job seekers everywhere, providing access to a larger pool of highly qualified candidates that puts these firms at a competitive advantage.

Jason Davis, RecruitingBlogs.com
Jason’s crystal ball shows an elevated sense that third party recruiting is really an art. He sites the Fordyce Letter’s increased presence, putting renewed emphasis on how recruiting should be done for many of the recruiters working today. Third party recruiters who take time to learn and implement best practices of the masters will profit handsomely from their investment.

Jason also sees increased use of social networking giving rise to the need to take these new relationships offline. He looks forward to seeing big movement in local community network creation as a result of online relationships. For recruiters, this can be a very powerful marketing tool. Jason expects new social networking features, such as LinkedIn’s Groups, to facilitate community-building.

Lastly, Jason confidently predicts there will be even more recruiting blogs a year from now.

Amitai Givertz, AMG Management Advisors
Amitai offers a different take, predicting that early adopters of social media for recruiting will remain in the minority. Too few frontline recruiters will risk the perils of transparency in corporate environments that need to mitigate risk and innovation and apply bottom-line metrics instead. As the economics of recruiting come under closer scrutiny with a softening economy and an inability to quantify the ROI on social media, there will be a slowdown in the rate of adoption by recruiters.

As the competition in the Web 2.0 market intensifies Ami foresees a proliferation of new applications, platforms, widgets and whiz-bang technology along with increasing usability issues in existing social networks. What was once fun will turn into drudgery with multiple logins and communities of "friends" to manage -- detracting from core recruiting activities.

Against this backdrop, Ami predicts a general backlash among the industry's early adopters. They will increasingly default to using proven resources like online sourcing, direct recruiting and building their personal networks.

For the rest, the gap between those who "get it" and those who "don't even know" will widen. The real opportunity that Ami sees for established vendors and service providers lies in helping close the gap as the front runners start to slow down and the early majority catches up.

Happy and Prosperous New Year!
Whatever your future holds, on behalf of ZoomInfo and friends, I wish you the very best.

Tad Goltra
GM and VP, Recruiting Business Unit