Candidate driven market is a phrase one hears from the recruiters when their usual sourcing channels dry up. It is happening now in most countries with the job sites. People expect a bit more from a web site but just a directory listing that a job sites mostly are. In the recruitment agency dominated markets like UK and Ireland, it really isn’t that exciting looking at the job descriptions that do their best to hide who the employer is, where exactly the job is, what is the salary offered, and anything else that could actually make the job advertisement attractive to the potential job seeker?
Candidate Driven jobs market
No applications on your jobs advertised on job sites and your own site is a reflection of the different expectations of the visitor of any site on the web today. Why on earth do you think anyone would like a web page with a sterile job description and click the ‘I Like’ button? Why would anyone share it to his friends? “Maybe I know someone?”. Well whoever I know I would never send to a vanilla job spec without any real info about the job or a company itself.
No application to your jobs advertised does not mean that there are no candidates around. Even dressing the issue nicely into the lovely phrase ‘Candidate Driven Market’, doesn’t help the fact that your attraction, advertising & sourcing technique is not working.
Recruiter Driven jobs market
You should control your industry as much as you can. Influence, participate, network, communicate, publish, share, lead, innovate, comment, ask, answer, organise, … be active. Be seen. Be Known (Didn’t Monster use that recently as a product name?). Candidate driven jobs market is happening to the recruiters that simply do not follow the candidates. Not all candidates change their behaviour all at once. A recruiter should look at the trends. It might be more worth recruiting from the source (media) where there are less candidates if there is relatively far smaller number of recruiters.
The initial success in sourcing candidates via the social media that the early adopters have recorded is a classic sample. It is not easy to recruit on Facebook or twitter. But guess what? No one is recruiting there! Whoever you find is very unlikely to have ever spoken (gen y) to a recruiter ever!