Does Job Boards Approach Really Work for Immediate Hiring Needs?

Blog 2: “Thanks to Antra’s Marketing Team to have my thoughts published on Antra’s website “- Jagjeet Kaur (Technical Recruiter Antra, Inc.)

I (Jagjeet Kaur) work as an IT recruiter to find talent for Antra’s clients and I wanted to share my experiences on why counting on job boards is like buying a lottery. Maybe it is not if you compare the exact odds but that’s how I feel when I think about this topic! It’s been over a year that I have been working at Antra (a leading IT consulting/ IT services/solution company)and my luck in finding relevant candidates on job portals has been very minimal. And I almost never find the right applicants for any immediate openings (good applicants needed in less than 24 to 48 hours).

These job boards are necessary for any recruiter. I will share with later in this post on how to leverage job boards to your advantage for hiring. But for now, they would not help (they did not help me) for any positions that needed to be filled immediately. For example, Dice and Monster are currently responsible for less than 5%, which is rather minor, of my overall number of hires at Antra (I can’t share the actual numbers for privacy reasons. Sorry!). I would say I am not surprised with this statistic. My experience has not been as good as I hoped.

Let me share some examples with you. I had made over 40 calls in a day to different job board applicants that I thought were relevant by just reviewing their resumes. However, more than 90% of these applicants were already contacted by other recruiters for the same position I was working on.

I know I got the job position at the same time as the other recruiters and I might be few minutes late in making calls. I understand timing is important but is it really that bad? Also, I notice a lot of irrelevant candidates applying for the job that takes up too much of my time just reviewing the resumes – applicants with location constraints applying for irrelevant locations, applicants without required skillsets, corp-to-corp applicants applying for non-corp to corp and the list goes on.

The above points made me wonder whether I was doing the right thing? What was wrong with my approach that caused me to be unsuccessful? It’s important I needed conversion – a metric that I measure my activity on candidates reached out vs candidates closed.

I had to rethink not only my approach using job boards but also on the holistic recruitment/hiring approach. I knew that using job portals can be very effective, and I had heard of countless numbers of success stories with candidates found on online portals. The difference between me and them was knowing the most efficient and strategic way to navigate major job portals.

In summary, over a period of time, I learned that agility is important to filling these open immediate requirements but having an “active” pipeline of consultants is a “must”. And I also learned on how I could use the candidate pool that I find on job boards to build my pipeline and I don’t solely rely on job boards to fill open positions anymore!

Key Learning Experiences with respect to job boards:

• Job boards may be a great tool to find applicants for immediate open positions but use the connections you build to generate a pipeline by technology, location, and billing rates.
• Job portals such as Dice, Monster, and Linkedin Jobs serve the purpose of reaching out to the passive candidates and connect with them. Use this to your advantage and reach out to potential employees, even if they may not be actively looking for a job.
• Keep your pipeline independent of the job requirements and use a good tool to save your pipeline. We use an internally built tool at Antra but there are several in the market (Bullhorn, etc.)
• Identify “ hangout ” spots for candidates based on the location, skillset, etc. Linkedin groups, Local meetups, other social media sites are great to find people that might be looking for jobs and have less competition to convert them.
• Don’t ignore the referrals. Always ask for employee referrals and this is the most trusted way to find people that are looking for jobs.
• Target the right talent by using a personalized approach on LinkedIn, Twitter, any career fairs/events and one to one networking opportunities, etc.
• And be empathetic to consultants and have a quick turnaround while you communicate to them. Being nice is not a bad thing!

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