Talent communities, passive sourcing and the death of the job board industry
I recently read an article that sums up a view I’ve held for some time. The piece on ere.net explains how inappropriate it is to attempt to use an ‘active’ candidate sourcing model and ‘active’ recruiters when hiring ‘passive’ candidates.
The vast majority of ‘talent’ at a professional level isn’t active and a recruiting strategy that focuses on targeting active talent would seem to be missing the point when looking to source ‘passive’ talent. I wonder how many Head’s of Recruitment would change their strategy if they knew these methods only target seventeen percent of the market.
This is where RPO and in-house recruiters can learn a huge amount from the way professional search businesses strategize. Engaging passive talent is their business model and they have a deep expertise in passive candidate targeting and ongoing engagement.
Search businesses create talent communities through the networking and engagement processes that are part-and-parcel of their job. And the great thing is business and social networking technology brings passive candidate targeting into the mainstream.
With this in mind, I can’t believe that active candidate targeting will remain as dominant a force in sourcing strategies moving forward, and for me this creates questions for the job boards.
If job boards represent seventeen percent of the market, can they really be that relevant in the current era of socially syndicated business networking?
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
Mark