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Articles tagged 'job boards'

Editor's Corner, The Sourcing Function

On Lazy Sourcing

by on Jun. 10, 2011

3 Comments

lazy computer

In a recent article on Forbes, Dan Schawbel wrote, “Job boards are becoming more irrelevant to the corporate recruitment process every single year. They are ineffective because of the sheer amount of competition on them and how they’re perceived by recruiters. Only lazy recruiters source candidates from them.”

Hold the phone (pun intended).

Only lazy recruiters (or sourcers) source candidates from job boards? Last time I checked, I was not a lazy sourcer. Even though in my current role I am not sourcing candidates anymore, I spent a good eight years in direct sourcing roles, and job boards / resume databases were certainly tools I used.

I know I am not lazy. But I also know that there is some truth behind this allegation. Let me explain why…

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Industry News, Social Media

LinkedIn Closes at $9 Billion on its First Day: Is it Really Worth 5 Times More Than Monster?

by on May 19, 2011

1 comment

LinkedIn / NYSE Euronext / Valerie Caviness

Wall Street investors who were bidding up LinkedIn faster than the last seconds of a hot eBay auction pushed the company’s value to $9 billion.

Not bad for a job board business network that saw its first profit last year.

The stock, which was priced in its first filings with the Security and Exchange Commission at $32-$35, soared to $122.70, before settling back in late afternoon trading to around $96.50 a share.

Trading as LNKD, the stock was the darling of Wall Street. More than 27 million shares changed hands by the time the market closed, several times the 7.84 million share that were part of the initial public offering. More than 200 stories have appeared in the financial trades and online since the stock opened this morning.  

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Industry News

Recruitment Drives LinkedIn Revenue as Company Nears IPO

by on May 13, 2011

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LinkedIn_logo

Next week, when LinkedIn is likely to begin offering its stock for sale, the 8-year-old company could find itself worth $3.3 billion.

According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a total of 7.84 million shares will be offered to the public at a price estimated to be somewhere between $32 and $35 a share. Of the total, LinkedIn will sell 4,827,804 shares, while existing stockholders, the venture capital investors, will sell the balance.

At the upper end of the price estimate, LinkedIn would be worth more than half again as much as Monster. (Stock held by the founders, other early investors, and executives, totals 89,547,185 and is factored in the total company valuation.) Monster’s market cap today is $2.04 billion.

Now why compare to Monster? Because increasingly LinkedIn is emerging as a social networking job board.

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Industry News

HR Job Listings Continue to Rise

by on May 5, 2011

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Indeed-HR-jobs-April-2011

Human resource jobs continue to grow, according to a report out today from Indeed.

From March to April, the number of postings for HR jobs increased 3 percent, making the sector fifth in job growth among the 13 categories tracked by Indeed. For the quarter, postings for HR jobs grew by 11 percent.

Although Indeed doesn’t track the specific HR jobs being advertised, keyword searches are counted, and the most popular keyword used by job seekers is “human resources.” During April, there were 695,000 searches using that term.

“Recruiter” was the distant second most popular search, with 108,000 searches.

Competition for jobs in New York was greatest. There were 209,000 clicks into HR job listings in New York, followed by jobs in Atlanta, which had 122,000 clicks. Because Indeed sends job seekers to the site where the job posting originated, there’s no way of telling from the data how many of those clicks resulted in applications.

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Editor's Corner, Metrics, Technology & Resources

The Sourcing Bull’s-Eye – Are You Using Your Resources or Wasting Money?

by on Apr. 28, 2011

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bullseye Jake Sutton

Whether or not you want to admit it, we all use some paid resources for our recruiting efforts. This could include any of the following products: job boards, resume databases, information gathering resources (like Jigsaw or Zoom Info), ATS’s, the list goes on and on. Yes – I am talking to you! I know you post jobs on Monster and CareerBuilder. I know you have purchased an applicant tracking system (that most likely is simply used as a repository for resumes with very little, if any, data organization). If we are spending money on these resources, why, then, do we so adamantly preach and train against using them when conducting candidate searches? If we’re paying for them, then why not justify the cost of using them by actually using them? And if we are not using them, then why continue to pay for them???

I learned great “Target Sourcing” in my early days of working in the world of recruiting. The idea of the candidate sourcing bull’s-eye is to guide sourcers as well as recruiters in the process of using resources effectively to find candidates.

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SourceCon, Technology & Resources

LinkedIn Is Not a Job Board

by on Apr. 13, 2011

24 Comments

LinkedIn_logo

In the recent months, LinkedIn has made deliberate efforts to move more toward a recruitment direction as part of their IPO strategy. Last month, LinkedIn announced that it had just reached a big milestone of crossing over 100 million members worldwide. On the eve of this occasion, I thought of putting my thoughts around my all-time favorite topic.

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Industry News, Metrics

Referrals Lead; Social Media Thrives; Job Boards Survive as Hiring Source

by on Mar. 18, 2011

1 comment

SOH-2011

Job boards are far from dead. For the second consecutive year, internal transfers and promotions were the primary source of hire. A quarter of the companies that have a contingent workforce have no idea how big it is. More than half the companies use social media exclusively or as a significant part of their direct sourcing programs.

And finally, and least surprising of all, referrals continue to be the leading source of external hires.

These are among the highlights of the 10th annual Source of Hire study by CareerXroads. Released this week, the study reports the results of a survey of 36 large, “well-branded” but anonymous U.S. companies who cumulatively employ 1.32 million workers and hired not quite 133,000 employees in 2010.

This is the 10th year that Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have conducted the survey to see where companies source their hires. As has been the case from the beginning in 2001, referrals from employees, vendors, alumni, customers, and other sources was the leading source of external hires. Last year, the surveyed companies reported 27.5 percent of their external hires came from referrals. The percentage has fluctuated only modestly over the years.

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Social Media, Technology & Resources

Should You Source eBay for Candidates?

by on Mar. 7, 2011

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Screen shot 2011-03-07 at 1.00.23 PM

According to a blog post by Andy Headworth, you just might want to keep an eye on eBay for job seekers in the future. Headworth brought to my attention an article in The Bristol Evening Post last week about a man named David Wood who listed himself on an eBay auction as ‘For Sale an Experienced Sales Representative.’

Creative, yes? But even according to the man, “If any one copies my example its [sic] not going to have the same impact.”

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Leadership, The Sourcing Function

Don’t Be a Sourcing Snob

by on Feb. 7, 2011

6 Comments

no_snobs_small

Are You a Sourcing Snob?

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Is a candidate identified on LinkedIn intrinsically “better” than a candidate sourced from Monster?
  • Is candidate sourced by cold calling inherently “better” than a candidate sourced from a job posting on Careerbuilder?
  • Does it really matter where a great candidate comes from?

I continue to see well-respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low, and there seems to be no shortage of those in the recruiting and staffing industry who are happy to jump on that bandwagon. However, whenever I read or hear broad, sweeping statements claiming that an entire population of 50,000,000+ candidates is low quality just because they happen to be in an online resume database of a major job board – my response is a mix of shock and disappointment.  

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Industry News, Social Media, Technology & Resources

LinkedIn Makes It Official: It’s Going Public

by on Jan. 27, 2011

1 comment

LinkedIn_logo

LinkedIn did the expected today. It announced it was going public.

The privately held company filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission saying it intended to list on either the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. No initial offering price was listed, nor was the intended number of shares to be sold.

That LinkedIn was preparing for an initial public offering has long been rumored. Earlier this month Reuters said the company had been meeting with financial institutions and would begin offering shares this year.

The company has multiple shareholders, including founder Reid Hoffman and his wife who own 21.4 percent of the private stock, and three venture capital companies.

In its SEC filing LinkedIn reported it has been growing revenue rapidly. For the first nine months of 2010, the company had $161.4 million in revenue, twice the revenue for the first nine months of 2009. It also posted a $10.1 million profit through the end of September versus a loss of $3.4 million for the first nine months of 2009.

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