Recruiters Say They Want Quality But Actually Want Quantity
My thanks to Peter Clayton of Total Picture Radio for making available the recording of the talk we had at the recent International Association of Colleges and Employers (IAEWS) conference in Chicago. Peter and I had a fairly short but wide ranging conversation about how corporate recruiters are compensated for hires but should be compensated for the performance of their hires.
Peter and I also talked about how many corporate recruiters tell CollegeRecruiter.com and other job boards that what they want out of their recruitment advertising campaigns more than anything else are quality candidates. Yet when those same recruiters talk with us and the other job boards about whether to try our sites and whether to renew with our sites the conversation is almost always about the number of clicks to their web sites or resumes they generated as a result of their job postings, banner ads, targeted email campaigns, cell phone text messaging campaigns, or other ad campaigns.
Why do these recruiters say one thing but reward another? Often because they have no choice. Their tracking systems are typically confined to their applicant tracking systems and those systems tend not to accurately track the source of resumes. Virtually every employer web site that has any tracking at all, and most don't, asks the candidate to self-identify their source. Yet studies show that well over 80 percent of candidates don't accurately identify their source so employers would do better not asking at all. If an employer is using an applicant tracking system that cannot issue unique web page addresses (URL's) for each sourcing tool for each job posting then that employer needs to find themselves a new applicant tracking system. No ifs, ands, or buts.
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