It’s no stretch to say that recruiting has evolved pretty dramatically over the past few years. The changes began, as they always do, with new technology. As companies started to shift even further away from traditional blue-collar work, the importance of knowledge workers to a firm’s success became even more obvious than it already was. For a cute illustration of this point, look no further than this advertisement put out by General Electric, announcing its identity shift from blue-collar company to white-collar company.
Of course, this increased demand for skilled, knowledge-based candidates came about just as the supply of such workers became tighter, since the world has largely recovered from the worst recession in modern memory and unemployment is now at near-record lows. The obvious consequence of this dynamic is that top-tier talent is now able to be incredibly selective when job-seeking.
At the same time, the rise of one-click-to-submit job boards made it easier than ever for candidates of all experiences to apply to anything remotely interesting to them. At RecruitBot, we call this the “Swipe Right to Apply” model of job seeking, and its ubiquity dramatically reduced the ROI of job boards, thanks to the signal-to-noise ratio of good candidates becoming so preposterously out of whack. As a result, less than 15% of all external hires at Fortune 500 companies are now filled through job boards, with one executive saying that his reliance on them has dropped by two-thirds in the last decade alone.
The confluence of these factors—the reduced utility of job boards, and the low-supply/high-demand pool of knowledge workers—has forced recruiters to grapple with the reality that recruiting has become far tougher than it once was. The recruiter of yesteryear dealt almost exclusively in cold-calling and resume-review; today, many recruiters mostly have abandoned inbound recruiting efforts, focusing instead on more passive methods like social media, PR, and marketing to attract top talent.
At RecruitBot, we think that abandoning inbound candidate sourcing and job postings is a costly mistake for your company. Sourcing more broadly can have huge net benefits for your company: most obviously it will increase the number of qualified candidates in your pipeline, which in turn will increase diversity and increase the odds of finding unconventional candidates.
More importantly, all of the significant downsides of sourcing broadly are mitigated or eliminated entirely by using RecruitBot:
- If you’re worried about a deluge of unqualified candidates, RecruitBot can rank and review thousands of resumes instantly, so you’ll only see those most relevant to your open position.
- If you’re worried about the poor ROI of job boards, keep in mind that more candidates in the candidate pool will necessarily lead to more hires per month. Job boards, in other words, pay for themselves—assuming you have tools like RecruitBot to help you.
- If you’re worried about a delay in contacting top-tier candidates that you discover from your pile of inbound resumes, RecruitBot integrates with the largest ATS software in the field, including Lever and Greenhouse. There are tremendous benefits to reaching out to candidates faster: you get to close them faster, obviously; and you don’t miss as many extraordinary applicants, since those are the candidates that move the fastest.
- If you’re worried about the difficulty of creating a raft of job postings and keeping up with a steady stream of resumes, RecruitBot works within and can filter everything you get from ZipRecruiter, Textio, and HackerRank, among others.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that rapid technological innovation and a tight economy would lead to recruiters abandoning job boards and heavily relying on inbound sourcing for open positions. But now, thanks to new technologies like RecruitBot’s machine learning, that trend is reversible. RecruitBot isn’t just a powerful tool that helps you filter resumes—it’s a tool than enables you to source more broadly than ever before.
