This summer, unemployment rates in the U.S. dropped down to 4.3 percent and the ratio of unemployed persons per job opening trended downward to 1.1, resulting in fewer available workers1. If unemployment rates remain low in 2018, employers will continue to face fierce competition for talent. This is a major worry, especially considering what a direct impact recruiting has on a company’s corporate brand and revenue.
Meeting the expectations of today’s job candidates will not only help employers get top talent in the door, it will unequivocally affect their business’ goals. When a business is understaffed, its operations and results suffer. In fact, when the right talent cannot be found, lost profit and revenue can be as high as $23,000 per unfilled position2. Just posting a job and reviewing the candidates that come in is no longer enough to hire the best talent.
Recruiting in this environment is clearly not just a concern for the HR department; it needs to be top of mind for senior executives in all areas of the organization. As the front of the HR funnel, talent acquisition is a necessary area of focus and investment in order to maintain a strong employer brand, build a healthy pipeline of candidates and make the best hires for the success of your business. But if you aren’t using the right tools to get to the candidates you want, you might be turning off potential applicants.
As competition for top talent has increased, so have the number of solutions to address this strategic function. The list of vendors supporting the recruiting process has grown into the thousands and changes almost daily. We’ve seen this not only from talent acquisitions start-ups, but also from HCM providers who offer add-on recruitment modules, and tech giants like Google sharpening their focus on the job seeking experience.
While the hiring landscape evolves, candidates are gaining control over the hiring process more than ever before. Increasingly, job seekers are approaching looking for a job like any other major purchase, from research to comparison, to making the final decision to “buy” or “apply.” This is why it’s incredibly important for companies to start considering consumer marketing tactics to attract job seekers to their employer brand. Their competitors probably already are.
The Modern Job Seeker Report, based on iCIMS proprietary survey data, uncovered some of the trends and drivers behind what makes a great candidate experience, and the impact that consumer technologies like online reviews, social media, and mobile applications have on recruiting efforts. For example, when researching a potential employer, working Americans rank employer reviews as the most important content followed by textual content on the company website and company publications or products3. Think about how important ratings and reviews are to you while shopping online. Employer review sites have become an equally integral part of the job search process, with more than 41 million unique users visiting Glassdoor’s mobile applications and website each month.
There is an enormous opportunity for companies to use 2018 as a fresh start and embrace a redesigned approach to attracting and hiring talent. Regardless of whether they get a job offer, applicants who are satisfied with their candidate experience are more than twice as likely to recommend the hiring organization to others, compared with those who were not satisfied4. On the flip side, candidates who have a poor recruitment experience are less likely to purchase products from the hiring company and are more likely to share negative feedback with their networks–and their feedback matters greatly.
An outstanding candidate experience lives and dies by the type of hiring technology you employ. You need a talent acquisition platform that offers robust integration capabilities to bring all the aspects of the increasingly chaotic recruitment technology landscape together. This way, you can leverage the individual strengths of social recruiting, job advertising, career site SEO, and screening tools that make it easier to find and attract the right people, yet still have a graceful transition of data to your HCM through one unified hub. When HR can offer a comprehensive analysis of the organization’s specific hiring landscape, they offer a glimpse into the business’ potential for success in the coming year.
1. Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS Report, 2017
2. U.S. Chamber Foundation, Managing the Talent Pipeline, 2016
3. iCIMS, The Modern Job Seeker Report, 2017
4. IBM, The Far-Reaching Impact of Candidate Experience, 2017
