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John Dick’s soap box
Food for thought ..........
The On-line recruitment revolution appears to be upon us with 75% of our candidate traffic now coming from job boards. The trend has occurred rapidly within the last three years and recruitment companies such as Options cannot afford to ignore the significance of the internet in attracting candidates which is the lifeblood of their businesses.
As the MD of a major recruitment Group for the last six years I have seen first hand the dramatic change in where the operating businesses get their candidates from. It is true across all our market sectors with Education and Health taking the lead closely followed by Accountancy and Finance, Commercial, Construction and Industrial.
During the past 3 years we have spent less and less on hard copy advertising and instead have heavily invested in advertising via job boards. Recently, following an in-depth analysis of effectiveness, we have started to move away from the big generic job boards and spend more of our budget on the niche boards such as construction4professionals which covers specific market sectors relevant to the industries we serve across our recruitment businesses.
Options Group as a business has had to become more ‘on-line aware’ and we believe that the only way recruitment and employment businesses will survive and prosper is by embracing the technology and harnessing the power of the internet. It is the only way to guarantee candidate flow for the future at substantially better ROI than through other sources of candidate attraction such as off-line media.
Typically across the Options Group we have seen the cost per candidate attracted drop from £40 to less than £4 in the last three years. Also with better filtering technology in place now, particularly on the niche sites, there has been little in the way of quality issues which we initially feared.
With this in mind I would urge all recruitment companies to undertake a strategic review of their candidate attraction methods and look to invest in advertising on the specific niche job boards, thereby achieving significant efficiency gains.
John Dick
Group Managing Director
Options Employment Group Limited