Sourcing channels surveyed include: company website / career site, existing candidate database, professional social networks, generalist job boards, specialist job boards, social media, employee referrals, CV databases, and online and offline advertising.
Sourcing channel quadrants for sectors & company size
In-house and agency recruiters were asked to rate each of their main sourcing channels in terms of the quantity and quality of candidates that they typically generate. The full report charts responses within a ‘Sourcing Channel Quadrant’ visually enabling recruiters to identify the effectiveness of each channel in each sector / industry and based on company size.
Some of the key findings in the report include:
Candidate scarcity is still the #1 challenge for recruiters
The lack of suitably qualified / skilled / experienced candidates is still seen as the biggest recruitment challenge for both agency (74%) and in-house (72%) recruiters. In-house recruiters cite a lack of recruitment marketing budget as their second key issue, however, agencies feel salaries being lower than market expectations is their next main challenge.
Measuring candidate sources is still an issue
Less than half of in-house recruiters surveyed are regularly measuring their recruitment sourcing channels. They are more likely to keep a close eye on their careers site application levels and monitoring the performance of their agencies/ PSL – in both cases 51% of in-house recruiters claim to be regularly measuring these channels.
Print advertising, which is the overall lowest ranked for candidate quality and quantity, is also the least measured channel by those who use it, being regularly monitored by only 22% of in- house recruiters and 25% of agencies.
In general, recruitment firms are more likely than their in-house counterparts to regularly measure their candidate sourcing channels. Over half of those polled claimed to be consistently monitoring the results from generalist job boards (54%) and specialist job boards (53%), their ATS / CRM (50%) and careers site (58%).
You may already know your next ideal candidate
Across all sectors both agencies and in-house recruiters recognise that their existing candidate database contains high quality candidates. Agencies consistently rank their candidate database as their #1 source of quality candidates. Searching their candidate database and contacting matching candidates is also the most likely first activity when an agency gets a new job to work on (39%). On the other hand, in-house recruiters rank their candidate database high for quality, but low on quantity – and less than 3% of in-house recruiters claim to search their existing candidate database as their first activity when presented with a new job to work on. Similarly, employee referrals are consistently ranked high for quality candidates but lacking in volume.
Commenting on the release of the full report, Eploy Chief Technology Officer, Chris Bogh said: “We set out to determine which candidate sources work best in each sector and industry and along the way we have uncovered some interesting insights.
What’s clear from the report is that there is no single ‘magic sourcing channel’ that recruiters can rely on to produce sufficient numbers of qualified candidates. We hope that our full, detailed report will enable in house recruiters to gauge their own experiences against their sector peers as well as agencies who work within their sector – and for agencies to see what’s working well in-house.
We’d like to thank all of the 600+ recruiters who took part in the survey and look forward to see how things change next year.”
The full 72-page report is now available for download free of charge: https://eploy.co.uk/ca16
