Getting talent management right starts with hiring the right talent. But according to Corporate Executive Board’s (CEB) 2011 “Smart Sourcing” study, shifting candidate preferences, an uncertain hiring environment and continued growth and evolution in online recruitment technologies have notable implications for how the best recruiting teams succeed now and in the future.

Emerging networking and search technologies offer recruiters in today’s global labor market unprecedented access to talent. But Web-enabled talent searches are not just about finding names. Winning the hearts and minds of the right candidates lies not in yesterday’s one-size-fits-all “post and pray, then pitch” recruiting approach. Today’s recruiting environment requires a dynamic and consultative approach where giving and getting the right information — about the job, the candidates and their potential barriers to switching — at the right time is key to successfully engage target prospects.

Tools for the Landscape
CEB’s active-passive index tracks job search activity among employed workers going back to 2006. The index reveals a steady rise in the prevalence of passive candidates — the percentage of the labor market not actively searching for a new employer. Globally, the passive candidate pool is bigger than it has been in the past five years, with nearly 50 percent in the passive category compared to only 22 percent in 2006 (Figure 1).

That said, active candidates — many of whom are unemployed or underemployed — are working hard to get recruiters’ attention. The average number of applications a recruiter receives for a given job posting increased by 167 percent from 2007 to 2011 according to CEB’s annual “Candidate Rules of Engagement” study (Figure 2).

The data suggests that post and pray recruiting strategies — the marketing-heavy method of recruiting that relies on posted job ads to generate enough good applicants — are adding to an already overloaded applicant queue and often generating the wrong applicants. The implications are twofold. The quality of many applicant pools is poor. The same study reports only 35 percent of the typical applicant pool meets even the most basic job requirements. Second, many recruiters are wasting considerable time filtering through low-quality resumes when their businesses need to focus on higher value-adding activities. This is where technology comes into play.