Monster’s “state of recruiting” survey finds competition for candidates is taking its toll on practitioners. Here’s what managers can do about it.

The rate of Americans leaving their jobs voluntarily reached a 17 year high this spring, just as unemployment hit an 18 year low. Economists and policymakers see these numbers as a measure of job-market confidence, and expect accelerated wage growth through the rest of 2018. All great news, but, for recruiters, a tight labor market makes for steep competition, especially for tech talent: the number of unfilled job openings is the highest it’s been in 17 years. Computer programmers can expect a million unfilled positions by 2020.

“Today’s strong economy is increasing the overall demand for talent, so recruiters are under tremendous pressure,” said Bob Melk, Chief Commercial Officer, Monster. In the company’s latest recruiting survey of more than 400 practitioners this August, 62 percent report their jobs being more difficult than the previous year, and 67 percent say the difficulty exceeds that of five years ago.

“[All this] underscores the need for an integrated recruitment strategy spanning the entire candidate lifecycle,” Melk says. “For recruiting to be effective in 2018 and beyond, it must go beyond traditional methods. A multi-solution approach – combining marketing, digital, and analytics – is critical in moving recruitment stress to recruitment success.”

Yet despite these concentrated efforts, the results aren’t what they used to be, with an average 44 percent of candidates being passed off to hiring managers, a 10 full percentage points short of the desired 54.

If you think about it, the above solutions are just different ways to advertise; important, but not a complete strategy in itself. It’s time to lay the foundation for longterm TA success, and the general consensus is that it will take new skills, and, for many, new tools to better recruit in a tight talent pool.

So what are the three action items to begin achieving these hiring goals?

1. Start marketing: Only 36 percent of recruiters surveyed reported using employer branding strategies, this despite the fact that 67 percent said they needed to understand Marketing to be successful.
2. Balance the scales between digital and human: Sixty-four percent of recruiters say they lack the tools to make their job smoother and another 51 percent say that a lot of the tech they do have actually makes it harder to connect with humans.
3. Learn to analyze your data: Fifty percent of recruiters report feeling anxious about time management and 67 feel they need to be analytics experts to begin tracking important metrics.

The proliferation of human capital management solutions in the last five years has given HR high hopes of becoming a strategic business-function, like marketing did the early 2000s. The tools to attract, select, and hire the right candidates are out there. Recruiters just need to convince the boardroom to invest in them.

SmartRecruiters wants to know: How do you make hiring easier? Monster’s SVP of Product Management Matthew Mund had this to say: 

1. Tell us a little about the impressive history of Monster.

Monster pioneered the business of digital recruiting in 1994. We are the premier global online employment solution for people seeking jobs and the employers who need great people. We’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years , and have expanded from our roots as a “job board” to a global provider of a full array of job seeking, career management, recruitment and talent management products and services. At the heart of our success and our future is innovation: we are changing the way people think about work, and we’re helping them actively improve their lives and their workforce performance with new technology, tools and practices.

2. How does Monster’s service work?

We find talent, wherever it lives. Monster is the premier career destination. More than 4,200 job searches are performed on Monster.com each and every minute and more than 2,000 jobs are viewed each minute. Nearly 70% of Monster’s audience is employed.

Monster as a Distribution/Network: Monster Career Ad Network® is the largest recruitment-focused ad network reaching over 75 million users, on average each month in the U.S. Combined with our strong partnerships to such leading brands as Yahoo!, Monster’s brand reaches 45 percent of the total U.S. Internet population.

Affinity Sites: Monster owns many affinity sites and other destinations for seekers. For example, our Military.com site is the leading online military destination for the military community with more military resumes are added to Monster and Military.com every day.

Partnerships: Monster has newspaper partnerships with over 1,000 daily and weekly papers in the United States. Our top 125 newspaper partners attract over 72.5 million unique visitors to their websites each month.

Resume Warehouses: With Monster’s latest innovation, SeeMore®, we connect recruiters with all their talent pools. Now recruiters can see and search resumes from all their databases, no matter where the resumes are located — from Monster, referrals, or internal candidates. Plus, with the powerful analytics tool built right into SeeMore, you can gain valuable insight into candidate data to make more informed recruiting, hiring, and business decisions.

3. What are Monster’s market differentiators?

Monster knows jobs. We also have patent-pending technologies that are unrivaled in the industry. Therefore we can offer clients a customized talent management lifecycle solution that far exceeds anything offered by our competitors.

4. Why should hiring businesses use the service of Monster?

Today, job seekers have many avenues to search, find, and apply to jobs. Recruiters are overwhelmed with the sheer number of candidates that apply from all different sources. The right match can save countless hours sorting through unqualified candidates. Use of internal labor pools can help retain top talent and grow company “keepers.” Social channels can capture younger labor pools and help keep all interested candidates engaged.

The problem is time and efficiency. How can HR professionals maximize their time, extend their productivity, and increase the return on recruitment investments? How can technology and vendor partners help recruiters spend more time on the “human” side of recruitment, such as interviewing candidates and working with hiring managers?

Monster uses innovation to find talent, wherever it lives, and match talent to opportunity with unrivaled precision. We measure our success by our customer’s success. Only Monster has such a robust and complete set of solutions to help you connect with the right talent.

5. What’s a fact we may not know about Monster?

Monster (formerly called The Monster Board) was the 454th commercial website in the world.

Additional Monster Information:

• Service (offered): Employment solutions to connect people to job opportunities.
• CEO: Sal Iannuzzi
• Blog: MonsterThinking.com
• Twitter: @MonsterWW
• Facebook: Facebook.com/MonsterWW
• Employees (# of): 4,000
• Founded: 1994

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent (a Monster partner), manage candidates and make the right hires.

• Introducing ability to post to Monster: Monster is a job board that is known to be a great source of candidates for almost all types of jobs. We are happy to announce that we are now fully integrated with Monster. You can post your jobs to Monster, directly from within SmartRecruiters job posting wizard, and receive candidates that apply via Monster directly into the SmartRecruiters system. With the new job posting workflow, you can do this while you simultaneously post to other paid and free boards.

  We would love to learn how Monster is working for you – If you use Monster to post your jobs and are able to source good candidates, remember to rate this board so that we can recommend it (link to previous post) to other SmartRecruiters’ users.

  

• Maintaining auto-reply template: Using the auto-reply template you can easily set up an email that goes out to all your applicants when they apply to any of your positions. This email is shared by all user accounts that you create – for other admins, hiring managers etc. This means that applicants receive this email for any job that is posted from your company SmartRecruiters account, irrespective of which user posts this job. This ensures that every applicant receives similar acknowledgment for his or her application.

  

• Re-posting jobs just got easy: If you have a draft job that you did not post earlier or if you want to repost an existing job, simply use the Post Job Action on the job page. You will be taken back to the job posting wizard where you can select the places you want to post your job and off you go!

  

This week’s bug fixes

• Some users were not able to sign up for SmartRecruiters due to browser incompatibility issues. The Industry selection widget was not working in these browsers. This issue has been fixed now.

• Inviting a colleague who will help you administer your SmartRecruiters system just got easy – the quick invite workflow has been fixed so that you can also invite Admin users.

• You can now create similar jobs using the copy functionality without getting timed out.

Free Software Forever. Signup for SmartRecruiters Free Recruiting Software.