I read a great post over at Social Talent recently, written by Manna Shah, titled “Why You Should Stop Posting on Job Boards, Now!” Shah laid out the workflow between going out on job boards and posting jobs, versus going out and specifically sourcing for the candidates you actually know will fit the opening you are recruiting for.
Here’s the chart from the post:
Basically, the concept is if you just post jobs on job boards, and even your own career site, you will have a bunch of candidates to dig through, screen, etc. This is classic “Post and Pray” and as of today (2017), it is still the primary recruiting strategy of most organizations around the world.
You can see the amount of time in the chart that is spent on just phone screening (30 hours on average), plus you have to do that with more candidates because you really have no idea if they’ll fit or not. When you are actively sourcing and targeting a specific individual you will have fewer candidates to screen overall, fewer candidates to interview overall, less ‘work’ overall.
Most talent acquisition pros ‘post and pray’ because they truly believe this is the least amount of work that can be done to get candidates to fill their jobs. It’s either that or they have no other skills! I like to believe that they have skills, so from a psychological standpoint, the only thing that makes sense is they must believe post and pray takes less work to accomplish the task of filling jobs.
It’s the classic case of working harder, not working smarter!
In talent acquisition, we have the ability to work smarter, but we keep making the work harder decision. Working on understanding your employment brand, establishing great recruitment marketing practices, and educating and developing your team to be active sourcers, are all things we can do, but instead we invest in posting more jobs. Post faster, post in more places, post, post, post!
Posting more is killing talent acquisition, and we are definitely reaching the law of diminishing returns when it comes to posting jobs. Being a modern talent acquisition shop doesn’t take more work, it does take a willingness and desire to change, and some patience to get the machine started up and running.
Sometimes we have to break some stuff to make the next things better. Posting jobs is one small part of what we do. We now have so many great tools at our disposal to attract and find talent. The big question is, are you ready to stop working harder!?
FOT Note: We here at FOT like to think we get talent and HR at a different level. At the very least, we are probably going to have a different take than the norm. So it made perfect sense to ask SmashFly to be an annual sponsor at FOT, where they’ll sponsor posts like this one, allowing FOT contributors to write, without restriction, on all things related to recruitment marketing and how it helps organizations find, attract, engage, nurture and convert talent. Learn how you can proactively protect your organization from the talent crunch by building pipelines of engaged talent in our Talent Pipelines Solution Guide.
If you Google “Tim Sackett” you’ll find our Tim, and a truck driver chaplain. Our Tim is NOT the truck driver chaplain, although how awesome would that be if he was!? He is a prolific writer in the HR and TA space who just happens to also run an Engineering and IT contract staffing agency (HRU Technical Resources) out of Michigan. He also writes every day at his own blog, the Tim Sackett Project. Weirdly, he’s known as an expert in workplace hugging, which was kind of cool years ago, but now seems painfully creepy, but we still love him and he’s fairly harmless. Tim is also on the board of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), lifetime Michigan State Spartan fan, husband to a Hall of Fame wife, 3 sons, and his best friend Scout. He also wrote a book with SHRM called The Talent Fix, you can find it on Amazon.