Recruitment agencies should embrace the Internet

As more employers progressively turn towards candidate targeting tools available through social networks to find candidates directly, a very real threat exists to both recruitment agencies and job boards unless they work together to fully embrace the reality of Recruitment Web 2.0.

While 57% of attending recruiters have a personal profile on Facebook and 53% on LinkedIn, the jury is still out on whether recruiters have yet to recognise the potential (or threat) that online social networks have on their businesses.

Of the nearly 100 attending recruitment companies that were surveyed, only 61% have their own website with Cape Town agencies by far leading the way in adopting an online presence. Another interesting statistic revealed that the majority of online job advertising spend comes from the 39% of recruitment agencies that do not have their own websites, where they are spending in excess of R5 000 per month on advertising their jobs on other online platforms.

Those companies that have realised the value of having their own website have seen a significant decrease in their online recruitment spend, while pioneering recruiters have managed to embrace the idea of Recruitment Web 3.0 (data-driven web automation) to enable them to spend less time capturing job advertisements on multiple platforms while streamlining and centralising the processing (filtering and screening) of job applications. Some 47% of recruiters are advertising their job adverts on their own websites with 27% of these companies using a white-label solution offered by their online recruitment solution providers to display and aggregate their job advertisements for additional exposure.

Some 91% of recruitment agencies advertise on one or more South African job boards with approximately 61% spending up to R2 500 per month on job advertising, 30% spending close to R5 000 per month and 9% spending in excess of R5 000 per month. Only 6% of recruiters have experimented with advertising on job search engines using the pay-per-click job advertising model.

A common trend amongst most South African Recruiters is that they tend to assign far too much value to only searching existing CV databases for skills and often neglect or even refuse to advertise their job requirements on job boards. The true value of a job board lies in the job advertising reach that it offers and not necessarily in the size of its searchable CV database. While a CV database offers instant access into the active job seeker market, there are those job seekers who might have placed their CV's into these databases but prefer to be hidden and are not searchable.

Jobs.co.za's CEO, Gillian Meier comments: “By advertising job opportunities on job portals such as ours, these job advertisements can be promoted not only to the active job seeker market, but can also be matched automatically to the hidden job seekers, as well as extended to the greater web audience through automated content driven job advertising to ensure that they attract quality targeted passive candidates.

“With emerging technologies, all recruitment companies should look towards partnering with online recruitment providers that can assist them in customising their filtering processes. This level of customisation will enable recruiters to concentrate on screening suitably matched quality candidates, thereby slashing recruitment costs, administration time and reducing time to hire,” she says. Visit the company website for more information - www.jobs.co.za