Smarketing Blog

Reactionary Recruitment & 3 Other Major Problems with Today's TA Practices

Imagine this scenario: a hiring manager calls you up to let you know that an employee has given their two-week notice. ‘Fill out this new employee acquisition form,’ you tell the manager. And then you hear nothing for two weeks while the hiring manager scrambles to get all the necessary approvals and signatures for the replacement. Once everything is signed, you start recruiting for the open position - in IT.

The average time-to-fill for U.S. jobs in IT is currently at 32 days, according to the most recent DHI-DFH Mean Vacancy Duration Measure, the standard assessment of hiring duration. Does your company have 32 days to wait, plus the two weeks it’s taken to get the approval to recruit in the first place?

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Your specific organization might not have issues in IT recruitment. Maybe for you it’s health services (49 days), finance (42 days), government (36 days), or education (35 days). Either way, the story is the same: reactionary recruiting is a major problem on today’s talent acquisition teams.

But there’s a better way: Attraction Recruiting™.

Register for the webinar: Attraction Recruiting for Diversity Focused Recruiting

Attraction Recruiting™ takes a step past inbound recruiting and utilizes a combination of content marketing, branding, and customer delighting techniques plus data to create a truly candidate-centric attraction program for future hiring needs. It focuses on what will attract today’s candidates to your business and fill your talent pipeline proactively, while allowing you to actually measure candidate engagement and interest. It's an inbound strategy for recruiting and pipeline building.

In addition to being a solution to reactionary recruitment practices, the Attraction Recruiting™ method helps solve three other major problems for your team.

1. You’re Using Outdated Technology.

Non-integrated, outdated technologies are useless to your TA team and cause prospective talent to abandon their applications halfway through completion. Between 60 and 80 percent: that’s the average abandonment rate from companies whose applicants have abandoned job applications due to technology or a cumbersome application process. Don’t let your company experience this same thing.

The technology you’re using likely can’t measure candidate engagement or even skill level, either. Most outdated technologies don’t support sourcing candidates without a 4-year degree. That’s a huge problem if you’re sourcing jobs in manufacturing or other skilled labor jobs, or even in IT, where nearly 40% of IT jobs are performed by candidates without any formal college education. Relying on traditional methods and outdated technologies to gauge both qualification and engagement of these candidates means you may be missing out.

2. Recruiting Costs Are Consistently Rising.

A study by ERE Media last year showcases the staggering costs of recruitment:

  • Entry-level employees cost between 30-50% percent of their annual salary to replace.
  • Mid-level employees up to 150% of their annual salary
  • High-level or highly specialized employees, up to 400% percent of their annual salary

The average cost-per-hire is nearly $4,000, according to Bersin by Deloitte’s latest findings. And that’s not even taking into account the cost of a bad hire - between $25,000 and $50,000, according to a survey by Careerbuilder.

The rising costs of hiring employees means that every second counts that much more. You don’t have money to waste not knowing if your candidates are engaged, or spending money to list your open positions in places that get no return. It’s time to move forward with your RRI - recruitment return on investment - in mind.

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3. You’re Unable To Effectively Source Passive Candidates.

Pursuing passive candidates is time-consuming and often more expensive, but often is one of the few options open to high-volume recruiters. However, many organizations have no easy way for passive candidates to express interest in their company without submitting a full application - which kind of defeats the purpose of being a passive candidate, amirite?

Attraction Recruiting™ allows you to see passive candidates who are downloading educational material from your site, reading about your company or helpful knowledge from your blog, and engaging with your company’s recruiters in a passive way, allowing you to continue to build that relationship with them until a hiring need becomes evident. At that point, you already know who is engaged with your recruitment brand and may be open to a conversation about a new position. It’s a win-win for both you and the candidate.

We talk about these major problems and others in our latest ebook, The Problem With Traditional Recruiting - & How To Fix It. Download it today.

Topics: Attraction Recruiting