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Imagine employers’ frustration. Employers invest an estimated $200 billion on recruitment worldwide, according to Josh Bersin, the founder, president and chief editor of Bersin by Deloitte, an analyst firm that covers the recruiting industry. Of that amount, employers will increase their spending on recruitment solutions and services by 16 percent to $8.5 billion by 2022, according to International Data Corporation, another analyst firm that covers the space.
Yet, they find themselves scrounging for a dwindling supply of job seekers to fill a rising number of vacancies as they try to stave off crippling talent shortages, which diminish productivity, force wages higher and jeopardize delicate bottom lines.
How can employers survive, let alone thrive, despite the talent odds so heavily stacked against them? They need to get recruitment technology that lures job seekers to the front of the hiring funnel before they worry about software for funneling candidates through it, which will give them the advantage over their competitors amid the tightest labour market in decades.
Talent Shortage Projected to Worsen
No matter how much employers spend on recruitment, they cannot buy a more favorable economy. A look at data from the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics reveals the increasingly dire economic situation that they face as the Great Recession further fades into the rearview mirror:
The numbers neither lie, nor discriminate, as talent shortages plague employers of every industry and size around the globe, and projections indicate that they will only get worse with time. Employers will face a total shortage of 85.2 million workers and a loss of $8.5 trillion by 2030 worldwide, according to Korn Ferry, an organisational consulting firm. That includes:
Employers Need to Turn Attention to Front of Hiring Funnel
Employers previously needed recruitment software to funnel an abundance of candidates through the hiring process, but the new economic reality requires that they use technology to lure now-picky job seekers to the front of it.
They should begin by optimizing their job descriptions for Google now that the search engine indexes vacancies shared on the internet. Those that do so will help their vacancies rank higher in Google’s search results and drive more traffic to their career sites, a critical concern as 69 percent of job seekers use the search engine to look for open jobs and research employers, according to iCIMS.
More importantly, employers will no longer need to advertise their jobs on costly job boards, as many job seekers will not need to look further than Google. For example, traffic to iCIMS’ career site skyrocketed by 90 percent after the company optimised its job descriptions for Google while that from Indeed kept declining year after year, its Chief Marketing Officer Susan Vitale told CNBC.
However, employers run the risk of losing job seekers’ interest if their career sites offer a poor search experience in stark contrast to the easy Google search that brought them there. They should look forward to iCIMS’ recruitment-marketing solution launching this year, which will include:
Employers need to realise that today’s selective job seekers may not want to immediately apply regardless of great career sites, though. Again, they risk the possibility of letting job seekers slip through their fingers unless they use a candidate-relationship management solution, which allows employers to build talent pools of job seekers and regularly communicate with them to nurture them into candidates. More importantly, job seekers value the ability to stay in touch with employers, too, as 55 percent of them joined talent pools run by employers that interested them, according to iCIMS.
Only after following those steps that address the front of the hiring funnel can employers finally turn their attention toward technology that smoothly funnels candidates through it.
