The Key Motivators Of Today’s Job Seeker

[Newshound]

The recruitment company Hudson have produced a very worthwhile and interesting report titled “Candidate Buying Behaviour – An Exploration Into The Key Motivators Of Today’s Job Seeker”.

While not terribly surprising, the findings help to quantify what is going on in the marketplace for human capital. It does show that you need to take recruitment very seriously and have a high quality, well though out and multi pronged approach to have any chance of attracting the best people.

I think it is reasonable to say this is a ‘must read’ for people involved in either recruitment or staff retention, including senior managers who are responsible for these functions.

You can read the full report here (it’s a 2Mb PDF file, so be patient and save a local copy once downloaded).

[kevinh]

Hudson's study showed that in all job categories a large percentage of people are passive job seekers, meaning they are thinking about changing jobs but not actively involved in the process. Depending upon the job category, the percentage of passive job seekers ranged from 24% to 45%, with HR people at 40%. This represent huge potential for recruitment, providing you can get the attention of these people.

The Hudson report also says that passive job seekers use both newspapers and the internet to keep an eye on the market. What it doesn't say though, is how often they do this.



Job Media did a survey some time ago in which HR job seekers were asked how often they used large, multi-discipline job web sites. This was the response from a sample size of 446 people;

Not at all 15.25%

Monthly 19.28%

Weekly 33.86%

Daily 31.61%

You can probably guess which ones are the passive jobs seekers.

Why is this important?

On the large multi discipline job boards traditionally used by most employers and recruiters, even in a moderately busy top level category, your ad would be lucky to stay on the first or even second page of search results for more than a day. Given the low frequency with which many people browse such sites, your chances of getting the attention of passive job seekers are very slim indeed, even for people who visit this sites once per week it would be hit and miss.

The message is clear - in order to reach the majority of potential candidates in the marketplace it is necessary to use multiple advertising channels and products.