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Anybody that has been to a Greg Savage presentation over the past 18 months or so, wouldn’t have missed one of Greg’s core messages; ‘Not everybody is looking for a job … but everyone is available to change jobs if the right job is presented’.

This message was again, front and centre when I watched Greg present Remake. Remodel. Future-proof recruitment last week in Melbourne.

Any recruiter in attendance at this series of Greg’s seminars couldn’t help but be persuaded by Greg’s success at Firebrand Talent. Greg and his team were able to identify and capture talent at a level significantly beyond what the Firebrand employee numbers would suggest would be attainable via traditional candidate-sourcing means (you can read my April 2012 blog on this topic when I first saw Greg give his ‘social recruitment company’ presentation).

Further confirmation of Greg’s ‘Not everybody is looking for a job … but everyone is available to change jobs if the right job is presented’ mantra was seen in the Clicks IT 2013 IT Job Seekers’ Report, released this week.

The top two trends mentioned in the executive summary of the Report were:

  • 84% of respondents update their resume at least every 6 months; a record high and a consistent trend. Three years ago it was only 47%.
  • 89% of respondents received a call from a recruiter about an opportunity which they had NOT applied for. Of those, 37% secured their new role this way.

Although some might argue that the IT candidate market is different and these results would not be replicated in other candidate markets, I would suggest that even if that’s true, the IT candidate market is a trend setter and that other candidate markets are going to go this way, if they aren’t already well down this same path.

The Clicks Report goes on to reveal that 49% of respondents had received a minimum of 4 calls from recruiters for roles for which they had not applied and 17% (of all respondents) had received at least 10 calls about roles for which they had not applied.

The basic fact that around one in every three candidates (of the 260 who participated in the Clicks survey) started a new job, having not applied for that job, should clearly indicate that if your major candidate sourcing strategy is waiting for candidates to come to you then you are giving your competitors are massive head start.

It still astonishes me to witness the massive waste of a recruitment agency’s resources that occurs when:

  1. candidates are interviewed and the consultant subsequently does not immediately and accurately enter and code/flag/tag the candidate’s details in the company’s database
  2. a call cycle is not established for every workable candidate
  3. a job ad is posted to a job board before an adequate search of the company’s database is undertaken

Every recruiter should know how valuable skilled talent is to them in being able to successful meet client expectations, yet very few recruitment companies have been able to consistently execute a candidate sourcing strategy that allows them to fill jobs that their competitors are unable to.

Jigsaw Search is one company who has been able to successfully do this.

Jigsaw’s candidate strategy is comprehensive and very different to almost every other recruitment agency I know. Jigsaw regard themselves as talent managers and brokers and spend 95% of their time meeting, vetting and testing their candidate’s competence and ensuring    that the gathered IP is coded and constantly updated and maintained. This is always undertaken without any reference to a current job. Jigsaw does not use any form of job board advertising, having last posted a job to Seek in 2010.

Jigsaw also has a structured candidate service process, that is centred around consistency of brand and focused on over-delivering in their candidate meetings and discussions. Candidates receive ongoing career advice from Jigsaw consultants, who are all specialists in the Procurement and Supply Chain sector; the only sector that Jigsaw works in.

What’s your candidate sourcing strategy? And are you consistently executing it?

The simplest metric to consider in answering this question is your job fill ratio. If it’s consistently increasing, then whatever you are doing, is working. If it’s consistently decreasing then whatever you are doing, it’s not working well enough.

If you don’t nail your candidate sourcing strategy very soon I would think your time as a profitable recruiter is just about over.

 

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