For the last three years, in addition to our annual salary survey, Be-IT has had independent research conducted asking candidates about, amongst other things, the different media and other channels they use to find new jobs.  Over this time, we’ve seen the market for IT professionals tighten. Demand is growing more intense and supply, especially in some of the very hard-to-fill areas, is limited, to say the least. How – and where – people find their next job is of huge importance and interest to recruiters like me and to employers in general.

The last question we ask in our survey is the one about media and the other channels candidates use to find jobs. We offer a variety of methods, including recruitment consultancies, job-boards, print and social media.  The changes over the last three years are shown in the table below:

Where & How do You Find Your Next IT Job?

This is interesting for anyone involved in recruitment because, to start with the first row, job-boards are clearly very popular with candidates and, according to our respondents have got more so in the last 12 months. Be-IT uses job-boards and gets some benefit from them, but there is no doubt that there is a general feeling in the recruitment consultancy world that they are of diminishing importance. In fact, I’ve heard it said more than once that their main value is as a branding platform. The big problem with job-boards though is that they are principally for those actively seeking a job – the person who wants a job and wants it now. Sometimes, these are great candidates, but equally they are often not the people we need. Winkling out great passive candidates and adding them to quality active candidates is what the great recruiters do…

Job Boards

Moreover, advertising on a job-board can lead to a lot of wasted time, with resourcers having to trawl through a lot of dross before they find the one or two nuggets who actually match the client’s brief.  Similarly, CV databases on job-boards are too often repositories of candidates no-one actually wants.  This is because they aren’t remotely suitable for the job in question, they don’t have the necessary paperwork to come to the UK or, very often, because they put their CV up there in 2012 and despite having had three jobs since then haven’t updated it or taken it down.  Yes, there are some diamonds amongst the dust, but sifting through a job-board CV database is frequently a pain rather than a pleasure.  The specialist IT job-boards (JobServe, Dice, Stack Overflow, etc.) are, from our perspective, better than the huge generalist ones (TotalJobs, Reed etc.) but, irrespective of their flaws, they are all a major part of the recruitment landscape and, depending on what Google Hire does (of which more next month), are likely to remain so for some time yet.

Recruitment Consultancies

The next row in the table is of especial interest, as it suggests that recruitment consultancies are slightly less popular than in the previous two years. That said, our industry has consistently been the No 1 choice of candidates for the last three years.  My own view is that the tightening market may well have caused some recruiters to become, how can I put this, a bit too enthusiastic in their pursuit of candidates than they perhaps ought to be.

It’s usually gratifying for a candidate to get a call from a headhunter saying he or she is someone “we want to talk to” but it palls as the next four headhunters all call the same afternoon about the same job.  As I have noted previously, it is important that, as the demand rises and more candidates start to feel plagued by rec-cons, our industry remembers that politeness, professionalism and tact are essential qualities of a successful recruiter.

Direct Approaches

Moving on down the table, we come to direct approaches to a company as a means of securing a new job. The percentage of our respondents doing this has remained constantly at c. 47%-45% over the last three years. And why not? Companies are always keen to hear from good candidates and if you are one and there is a suitable job available then they’ll be even happier to save themselves the cost of a recruitment fee or advertisement.

If you know that company X has the job you’ve coveted for the last three years, demonstrate your ability to get things done by getting in touch directly. However, and while you know I’m going to say this it doesn’t make it any less correct, bear in mind that one of the reasons recruitment companies exist is because most companies don’t really have the in-house recruitment infrastructure to handle constant speculative CVs/applications.

Even those with a well-developed in-house team like to have some order in their processes and while I would never discourage anyone from going directly, remember, that an in-house team usually only ever has one job to offer you (which, of course, you might not get) while rec-cons usually have several.

Paid Media

The next two rows cover paid media. I know that social media is in theory free, but no-one has told the social media companies this.  Print advertising obviously costs (and in the old days cost thousands and thousands), but it has been withering on the vine for many years now. That’s why it was slightly surprising to see it being rated more highly this year, rising to 8% from a low of 2% the previous year. My suspicion is that this reflects a growth in public sector IT advertising: the public sector being generally more prepared to advertise in traditional print media.

Social Media

Social media are, of course, where it’s at. Or at least it’s where we all believe it’s at.  At Be-IT we invest a lot of time and money in our social platforms and we find that they are useful, but not always in the ways you might expect.  Social media are only valuable if you measure how many people they are driving to your jobs and we know they contribute well here, but there is no doubt that their other principal value is as a means of communicating and engaging with a wide range of different people and businesses.

Here, social media undoubtedly come into their own, acting as a rising tide to lift all ships (did I hear someone say “passive candidates”) towards the Be-IT website and especially our news and blog pages. This is where our social media efforts really bear fruit, because from the blog pages visitors to our site can, and do, make forays into other pages, learning more about our company and, even if they are not actively looking for a new job, leaving with a positive impression that will, I trust, benefit both parties in the future.

The contrast here with job-boards is important.  While acknowledging that the job-boards’ own marketing gets us candidates, it’s true that job-boards (and LinkedIn) want to keep those candidates on their sites. We want them on our site, away from the temptation to apply for any jobs that are not “ours,” hence our concentration on quality content on our site and active promotion of said content on our social media. The fact that we’re seeing it rising in importance over the last few years, with c. 50% of respondents citing it as important last year, suggests we are right.