Online job sites dominate UK recruitment market

by Vikas Vij — Recruiters need to gear up to the needs of today’s connected generation, which Google calls as Generation “C”. With significant differences in attitudes between the generations when it comes to career motivation and work/life balance, recruitment agencies need to consider whether they are delivering what the candidates of today really need.

 

Research undertaken on behalf of Bond International Software set out to discover the current state of the recruitment market from the candidates’ perspective. One thousand UK workers responded to an in-depth survey, and the results are informative and quite revealing. The market research report explains how organizations can accurately find candidates in a world where 38 percent of employers are struggling to fill vacant positions.

 

According to the report, increased economic confidence over the past couple of years has encouraged individuals to make a job change, with over a quarter of office workers looking for a job in the last six months, and a massive 72 percent having looked for a job in the last three years. Interestingly, the survey reveals that 81 percent have used online job sites when looking for a job in the last year.

 

Online job sites are clearly the number one preferred starting point for candidates, with 68 percent of respondents saying that they found it the most helpful in comparison to just 38 percent who found recruitment agencies of most help. In fact, if searching for a job today, 94 percent stated that they would be likely to use an online job site.

 

These figures also reveal that candidates have a misconception in terms of recruitment agency versus online job boards, because the majority of roles on job boards actually come from recruitment agencies directly. This demonstrates a need for recruiters to be actively following up on candidates when they receive an application directly via a job board.

 

As many as 58 percent of the respondents who used a recruitment agency in the past said that they found the agency via online search. Clearly, agencies need robust SEO strategies and tools to rank high in online search results for relevant keywords that are optimized to match specific skill searches.

 

The report said that only 25 percent of the candidates have used social media to find a job, and of these, just 14 percent found it helpful. However, there is a gap between management and non-management roles with regard to social media.

 

Forty-six percent of C-level executives and 50 percent of Executive Directors are very likely to use LinkedIn to search for vacancies compared to just 15 percent of those earning less than £25k.

 

The research also found that while 42 percent of office workers use LinkedIn for work related purposes, when it comes to searching for a job one in ten candidates would never use social media, and a further 40 percent would be unlikely or very unlikely to use social media.

 

According to Toby Conibear, European Business Development Director, Bond International Software, it is clear from the research that market specialism rather than social media is set to have the biggest impact on the market over the next few years. There is a clear need for recruiters to get specialist, and those recruiters that harness and improve candidate relationships, offer industry specific advice, and can provide end-to-end excellence in recruitment processes will be the ones to win over the competition.

 

Source and Image: Bond International Software