So How Do Those Big Companies Really Recruit?
Ever wonder how those large companies really recruit candidates for jobs? This survey studied over 41 large companies (the typical respondent had over 90,000 employees worldwide, most of whom worked in the U.S.), who filled about 6% of their positions in 2003.
OK, so where did these companies recruit to fill a total of 275,000 job openings? You might be surprised to learn that
the study reports that 35% of those positions were filled from internal transfer and promotion. Of the remaining positions, most of the applicants came through just two sources:
1. employee referrals (29%); and
2. You guessed it , the Internet (32%).
The next closest sources, in terms of positions filled, were newspapers (3.8%) and career fairs (2.8%).
Now, let’s consider the Internet in greater detail. Of those hires from the Internet, more than 2/3s came from the company website and only 18% from a niche source.
Pretty clear from this that job hunters need to spend alot of time networking and alot of time on the computer, checking company websites!
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Comments
I’m just guessing here but I suspect that a good percentage of those Internet sourced hires actually came from newspaper ads but responded via the Internet.
Hiring is still generally a local thing. People work near where they live and the local Sunday classifieds still reach the right market.
Also, the study does not mention applicants coming from recruiting firms and agencies and I would bet that figure is greater than 0%.
Beth C.
Nobscot Corporation
http://www.Nobscot.com
blog: http://nobscot.blogspot.com
Michael has good advice for job seekers.
Now here’s George’s advice for employers:
Each of the most common recruiting methods according to this study is potentially subject to a disparate impact challenge.
On internal promotions, see the current Wal-Mart class action (you can use the search feature at the top of this blawg to search for “Wal-Mart” and find various posts on this case).
Word of mouth referral is vulnerable because it will reflect the lack of diversity of a relatively nondiverse workforce, if that is what you have (we have also written on this).
Finally, I believe there is still somewhat of a racial Internet gap, although it has been shrinking.
Bottom line advice: keep using those newspaper ads, career fairs, etc. as means of outreach to a broader applicant pool. As insignificant as they may be in practice, doing so could possibly be useful in showing that the overall recruiting process is nondiscriminatory.