This week saw the release of the The Recruitment Reality check report. It’s the result of a unique collaboration between Monster.co.uk and researchers at the University College London; Felipe Cuadra MSc and Adrian Frunham PhD. They surveyed over 300 UK recruitment professionals on Monster’s employer database, asking about their opinions and insights into their own recruitment initiatives. You should read the full report but the two main areas are finding and selecting candidates.
Finding Candidates
Trending:
➜ Professional social media sites are being used to a greater degree than the traditional printed advertising. Organisations use professionally-orientated social media sites twice as often as personal sites (e.g. Facebook) as they are perceived to attract higher quality applications.
➜ Referrals from current employees are used by 85% of respondents and are perceived as a low cost and effective means for recruitment.
➜ Similarly, almost three quarters of respondents target passive applicants since it’s seen as a low cost, high yield practice.
➜ The results show that practitioners think professional job sites are more effective and actively use these over other tools
Declining:
➜ Blogs and job fairs (traditional and virtual) were thought to now be ineffective.
➜ Printed ads to find candidates continue to decline, signalling an increasing trend towards digitalisation.
Selecting Candidates
Trending:
➜ Overall ‘gut instinct’ or intuition is perceived as the most cost efficient and third most effective recruitment tool.
➜ While the traditional interview continues to be popular, phone interviews and virtual (video) interviews are perceived as cost efficient alternatives, with similar degrees of validity. Almost half
(48%) of the respondents say they use virtual interviews and 84% use phone interviews. Interestingly, 7% of respondents did not report any form of face to face interview.
➜ Reference checks are very frequently used (84%).
➜ cV checking is also very prevalent (88%) and exhibits similar levels of perception of cost and efficiency as reference checking.
Declining:
➜ Psychometric testing (intelligence, personality and assessment centres) are rated as the most costly selection tools.
Bit disappointed to read about the decline in psychometric testing (I still do a fair bit of this for recruiters and I think it’s cost effective!) and surprised at how high the figure for CV checking is. I actually wrote about the rise of video interviews this week too.
What do you think? Does this lead you to reconsider some of your recruitment practices?
