Are Talent Seekers Reaching You?

Posted by Mario Patenaude on Mar 26, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Once talent seekers have made a decision to fill a job vacancy, the next step in the process is to find an expedient and cost-effective way to source or identify potential candidates.  In essence, talent seekers are looking for buyers of its career opportunities and will use advertising, marketing and sales pretty much in the same way as any other sales organization would do.  Their career or job advertisements will appear on the web, either on job boards or their own organization’s career page, and any other electronic or print news media such as trade magazines and daily newspapers.  Of course, they will also post their jobs on LinkedIn and Facebook.  Talent seekers will develop their talent acquisition strategy for any particular job, based on where they are most likely to reach potential candidates.

In some cases, where they believe that talent will be hard to reach, they will outsource the work to recruitment consultants or agencies, which will use databases and networks to identify potential candidates.  Some of those agencies will already have a pool of candidates which they will have identified previously, and who they can propose to talent seekers.  The temp agencies tend to operate that way.

Most organizations will post the jobs internally for their own employees to apply if they are seeking another job.  They will also use their employee population as recruiters and sources of potential candidates.  Talent seekers now use a new generation of software tools to make it easy for their employees to use their social network to identify candidates.  They will typically reward an employee for having recommended an individual for job, who ended up being hired (These are called referral programs).  The reward will range from a few hundred dollars to several thousands, so job seekers should not be surprised when their social network contacts appear to be more than willing to help them find a job with the organization where they work.

In fact, more people are hired through referrals than any other means of finding candidates, and the process is probably the cheapest and most likely way to find great candidates.  That is because a current employee who recommends a contact is likely to not only have a good understanding of how the candidate will fit in the organization, but will also help the individual adapt to his new employer during his on-boarding period.  A current employee is far more likely to be objective when describing the job and the organization to one of their network’s contacts.

Job seekers need to be somewhat skeptical when approached by talent seekers, as they are undoubtedly selling the opportunity in an attempt to get to a deal.  The best employers out there stay away from overselling the job opportunities, as they know that a candidate’s expectations need to be well managed in order to avoid disappointment after they join the organization and discover reality.

For the job seeker, the answer is to use a job search engine which scans the job boards as well as organization and recruitment consultants’ job opportunities sites.  The best of both worlds is to also have a solid social network of individuals who can identify and recommend opportunities, and who can provide both a referral and insider information regarding a job opportunity.  We believe that Jackalopejobs.com is that system.