idealpeople blog

We’re hearing the term “Generation Y” more and more here at Idealpeople Towers. This is pleasing, because we’ve got a lot to say about what we’re calling “Candidate 2.0″ - i.e. the new generation of job-seekers who have seemingly very different priorities and drivers than before.

There was an interesting piece on this in Recruiter this month, which highlights not only the changing nature of job-seekers but also the problems associated with having too short-sighted a recruitment process.

The report highlights one particularly interesting factor:

Not everyone is using the internet in the job-seeking process
Recruiter’s survey suggested that almost 70% of “Generation Y” (which is defined as people of 29 years of age and under) job-seekers have visited internet recruitment websites - although only 50% have applied for a job on-line and only 37% have put their CV in one of the many on-line CV banks. On the flip side, just under 60% of “Generation Xers” (defined as people betweeen 30 and 42 years of age) have browsed recruitment websites, 35% have applied for a job on-line and just under 25% have put their CV in a CV bank.

On one hand, these figures suggest that the internet is playing a huge (and increasing) role in the recruitment process. But - if we look at these figures slightly differently - you could argue that an over-reliance on web recruitment is dangerous.

Most estimates suggest that 10% of the population are actively seeking employment at any one time. So if this is true, then 10% of people working in technology are actively looking for a job at any one time. Now clearly, the majority of people who aren’t actively looking for a job aren’t going to be browsing jobsites, registering CVs or applying for jobs (with a few exceptions, maybe).

If we combine the stats for both Generation X and Generation Y, then we calculate it as around 65% of these active job-seekers have browsed recruitment websites, 42(ish)% have applied for a job on-line, and around 30% have put their job in a CV bank. Which, again, looks pretty good.

But these figures are relative: i.e it’s actually 65% of the 10% who are actively looking for a job who are browsing recruitment websites as part of their process.

It’s important to remember that around 85% of people would change jobs if offered a better one - even if they’re not actively looking for a change. 15% wouldn’t change jobs no matter what was put in front of them. Your talent pool is always 85% of the people working in your industry.

By this maths, 8.5% of the entire IT talent pool is actively looking for a job, which means 5.53% of the talent pool are browsing recruitment websites, 3.6% are applying for jobs on-line and 2.5% put their CV in a database.

These aren’t particularly great stats - particularly for those recruiters who rely on internet advertising and CV database searching for candidates (and there are some - take a look at this discussion thread between recruiters about the effects of Reed making users of their advertising services pay, where traditionally it was free).

No doubt the numbers will improve, and with Social Networking moving on up (interestingly, only around 8% of people questioned make use of Social Networking in their job search - although the number is probably more than that, they just don’t know that they’re doing it…), the internet can be used more and more and more to attract passive job-seekers to your recruitment process.

So - yes, the uptake of on-line technology in job-seeking is improving, but a reliance on it could leave you marketing your vacancies and brand to just 5% of the available talent pool. It’s important tool for sure - but to hire the best, you’re going to need more than a purely “internet only” methodology.