Today, there are so many recruitment solutions out there, with a new one coming up every month and many disappearing into oblivion every month. The interesting question is, why are we trying to solve this challenge when there are so many out there already?
To get to an answer to this existential question let’s try to figure out:
- What are the biggest sources of candidates for companies today?
- What are the solutions out there in the market and check how they help in improving recruitment efficiency? and
Finally, let’s look at the reasons why a solution like HireWand would be needed in spite of the many solutions out there in the market.
Source of candidates
Who better to answer this question than LinkedIn? Check out the chart published by LinkedIn in their global trends paper for 2015:
Notice something interesting about the top sources? These are Internet job boards, Social professional networks, Company career websites and Employee referral programs. All of these bring in large numbers of resumes through which the recruiter needs to wade through to find the right candidates for different jobs.
Now check “Internet resume databases” on the chart, way down South. Downloads from Job Portals fall within this bucket. There is a widespread notion that Job Portals happens to be the primary source of hiring in companies. When you spend some time digging through the data of any company you realize this is a myth prevalent across the industry. The chart above clearly breaks this myth. Why such a false notion is so prevalent is a topic for another blog post.
I believe the data in the last section speaks to us of a potentially huge opportunity that companies today are missing out on. To understand this, let’s think of the 3 primary factors that a firm is concerned about in hiring:
- Lead time to hire
- Quality of hire
- Cost of hiring
Let’s consider the new age recruitment solutions again – do they really help in improving all the above factors for a company? Let’s see:
Promise of quality: Many solutions out there promise quality candidates, either selected through better pre-screening or through tests. These “solutions” then charge the companies more than 15% CTC for every hire. So are these really even SaaS services or are they recruitment firms masquerading as a product?
The cooler version of Naukri: So many solutions pitch the value of “we are better than Naukri because _____”. You can fill up that blank with any conceivable reason, be it ease of use (swipe, swipe swipe), speed of hiring (24 hour offers), short circuiting notice periods (a competition to break commitments anyone?), reverse auction and so on. These short term differentiators do not seem to stand a chance against the brand and traction that Naukri already has. These new solutions simply add to the list of sources that the recruiter needs to deal with already. They only add to the overheads on the recruiter, add to the cost of hire with no impact on quality of hire and a marginal reduction in lead time.
Specialized solutions: Vertical-specific solutions, especially around referral hiring and social hiring, promising employee engagement with gamification and of finding candidates from employee networks by simply tapping into their LinkedIn network are in vogue. Referrals are definitely an excellent source of resumes, but are still just one of the 4 main sources. Hence they cannot be the onesolution the recruiter can depend on, to help with shortlisting.
Passive candidate search: These solutions tend to draw profiles from GitHub, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, Meetup groups and more. The idea is to aggregate profiles across these sites and present a single view. They also provide search across these profiles to surface the right candidates. There are a few challenges with passive candidate search:
- Most candidates are passive and by nature do not respond positively to either the job or your company. This adds a huge cost to the recruiter who has to sift through these profiles manually, calling each of them up, impacting lead times and cost of hire. The situation is made worse with the same top candidates appearing in the list for most companies and naturally getting tired of calls from recruiters. The fatigue that sets in results in quick refusal for any calls made to them making the job so much more difficult for the recruiter.
- This pool is a small number compared to the large pool of quality candidates who today, are putting in their time working for organizations and less time in presenting themselves in these open forums.
- The legality of public crawling of these sites (especially LinkedIn) is suspect.
- A new trend of more and more “posers” presenting themselves on these public sites for jobs is making matters worse. Their carefully crafted profiles with copied code, duplicate project etc., do not represent the real capabilities of the candidate.
