The future of recruitment

Andrew Gordon, director of jobs.ac.uk, explains why technology is going to change the way your business searches for talent

Recruiting the best employees looks set to get a lot tougher in the near future. There is already a severe shortage of skilled workers in many sectors of the economy and unfortunately, the national 'talent-shortage' is set to grow steadily worse.

However, employers of all sizes are finding that they are saving huge amounts of money on newspaper recruitment costs by recruiting staff through jobs boards instead. With traditional recruitment advertising methods declining there is a rise in cheaper online alternatives with now more than 1,200 jobs boards in the UK to choose from. There are a growing number of niche jobs boards too that concentrate a large number of the skilled people recruiters are looking for. High quality jobs boards add job adverts extremely quickly so the jobseekers know they have access to the latest vacancies.

Looking ahead, one fundamental change that could hit jobs boards is if online recruitment advertising moves to a 'pay-per-click' model. This is where the recruiter would pay only when a jobseeker clicks on their advert on a jobs board. This could even evolve into a pay-per-appointment model with the recruiter paying only when a person is actually appointed from the jobs board. If organisations are used to paying for other online advertising this way, they may begin to question why jobs boards insist on sticking to the old revenue model.

Other changes will be recruiters exploiting the social networking phenomena. Employers can, and increasingly will, target prospective employees either directly or indirectly through sites such as Ecademy, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and the like. They may even begin to advertise their vacancies on blogs that also advertise jobs to their niche readerships. Unsurprisingly, these sites are sometimes referred to as 'blogs with jobs'.

Recruiters will also use more online 'word-of-mouth' (WOM) marketing programmes to attract candidates. This might mean producing an employer video that shows what its like to work within the organisation. Make it amusing or entertaining enough and your potential candidates might see it as it is passed around via email, Instant Messenger and on YouTube and elsewhere.

There are other WOM schemes that reward staff if they recommend a candidate who is then appointed into a job. This sort of thing has always happened of course. But there are now a number of websites that help organisations tap into the social networks of their current workforce in order to attract their future workforce.

Current technology already allows recruiting organisations to create their own 'talent-pools'. This is when an employer stays in touch with future employees by maintaining email distribution lists. These lists contain people who have provided their details so that they can be kept informed of job opportunities.

To attract the best, businesses will need to enhance their online marketing skills. They will have to become more savvy users of jobs boards, blogs, social networking sites, RSS feeds and email in order to reach the growing number of online jobseekers.