Proactive Recruitment Marketing Tools Will See Increase in 2010

I recently came across the press release for TalentDrive’s “Recruiting and Hiring Environment in the New Decade” survey and wanted to share a few of the findings that I think are encouraging (and intriguing) for Q2 & Q3 of this year.  Here’s an excerpt of the findings (from the press release):

10,832 professionals from F1000 Companies, Staffing Firms and Independent Recruiters were surveyed.  This survey was conducted between January 20th, 2010 and February 20th, 2010 online.
In summary, the survey found these key take-aways:

*  44% of companies increased hiring budgets for 2010
*  50% plan to begin hiring most actively in Q2 and Q3 2010
*  Over 75% are NOT prepared for the return of hiring
* Top tools for recruiting new talent? 52% Proactive Recruitment Marketing; 31% Sourcing Technologies; 60% Social Media
*  38% are afraid the competition will recruit their top talent

I think there are three things that are significant about these results:

1. Hiring in general is trending upward for many of these companies (which is good news all around).
2. While hiring is expected to increase, many of these HR departments feel wholly unprepared to handle this inevitable increase in acquiring talent.
3. Third and most importantly because HR departments are looking to hire more and feel unprepared, they are looking to technologies and tools to allow them to deal with this demand and help them do their jobs more effectively (and just plain make their jobs easier.)

While all three points are important, it’s this last point that excites me most.  It suggests that HR departments are finally realizing the value of incorporating the latest tools and technologies into their recruitment marketing campaigns.  With the full scale adoption of the ATS system to handle the process of handling and hiring candidates, companies have begun to scratch the surface of utilizing technology to optimize their recruiting efforts.  The next logical step is to put the latest technology to work on the next most important aspect of recruiting, identifying and capturing qualified candidates.

Companies will need tools that provide functionality and transparency to the front end of their recruitment marketing campaigns to beat out their competition in recruiting the best people.  They will need tools that provide the ability to:

• Launch individual recruitment marketing campaigns across the web quickly and easily through job ad distribution.
• Measure & analyze the best (and worst) performing in their recruitment marketing campaigns with real-time recruitment metrics (so they can quickly shift to a more profitable recruiting mix)
• Leverage company and employee social media resources in advertising job campaigns
• Provide new innovative (and possibly automated) ways to source and capture candidates online

Make sure you are not part of the 38% that are afraid of the competition taking the best talent.  Find tools and technologies that can provide the important recruiting functions above and be the competition that everyone is afraid of.

*While we may have a little bias on this topic, we truly believe everything we said above. At SmashFly, we’ve incorporated all these tools (quick & easy job campaign launch, social media, metrics & analysis, new sourcing technologies) into our recruitment marketing platform, WildFire, and have helped our partners leverage these tools to take their recruitment marketing campaigns to the next level.

If you would like to learn more about Smashfly’s recruitment marketing platform please visit our website or sign up for a free demo.