
Phasers On Stun
(November 21, 2002) -
Ideally, the market for candidates should work according to some rules of
supply and demand. You need to fill a position? How many candidates with what
criteria does that take? Here they are.
Sounds simple but we have had the hardest time
arriving there. The Big Three firehoses produce a flood of less than perfectly
screened resumes and a consequently higher administrative workload. The little
guys produce an erratic trickle of the right stuff. Everybody's learning while
the customer pays a high price. No one has the full answer.
For the big boys, better quality service
involves smarter search engines, clearer categorization and all of the other
things you'd expect when trying to tame something that got too big too fast. For
the little guys, more precise correlations of advertising and customer needs are
the game. Adequate forecasting (which is now possible but unpracticed) is still
too expensive for the little guys and too complicated (at scale) for the big
players.
We're believers in Campus
Career Center's commitment to deliver the candidates you need but understand
that their model works well on campuses and may not translate well to other
venues. That it's harder to do off campus is not a good reason for not
attempting to do it. The definition of effective service from a job board ought
to be just the right number of the right candidates. Campus
Career Center delivers on this promise for college recruiting.
A useful alternative is Hire.com's
model which produces candidates who are qualified and available. While precision
in quantities remains somewhat problematic, the administrative burden is
radically reduced from job board dependence allowing rapid improvements in
hiring cycles. Hire.com offers solid
supplemental tools for increasing candidate traffic volume.
We're taken with another new innovation from RecruitUSA.
The "Phaser" allows customers to set an ad budget and a
prioritized/scheduled procurement of ads. In other words, you can wait to turn
on the firehose until after you've tested the trickles. By setting a
spending budget per job and prioritizing the use of various boards, a new level
of control is available. A Recruiter can turn off the spending when the right
level of candidate saturation has been achieved. No longer does the use of
multiple boards mean that you have to sift through the results of them all at
the same time. RecruitUSA is wrestling
with the problem of turning the flow into a faucet that can be easily managed.
It's worth a look.
There's more ground to be covered. In the long
haul, having the right level of candidate volume at the right time is a matter
of building out very complex relationships in volume over time. We're just at
the edges of learning how to do that.
-John
Sumser