Corporate Career Site: Destination or Source?

While catching up on some back feeds I ran across the research summary posted by Gerry Crispin at Career Crossroads Annex. You can read the full  post here. I found both the full report and the summary chock full of interesting factoids.

From Gerry's blog summary:

- 61% of all External Hires can be attributed to just two ‘Channels’- Employee   Referrals & the Internet.

My 2 cents: This number continues to grow. Many observers are crediting the job  boards with the majority of the  Internet candidates, but I believe that number is shrinking relative to the total number of Internet candidates as candidates in increasing numbers are seeking direct relationships with companies they are interested in.

- The Internet and expanding referral networks continue to put pressure on traditional forms of recruiting.

My 2 cents: This especially true of the expanding referral networks. This phenomenon goes beyond traditional employee referrals and is now augmented by formalized relationship networks using the power of the Internet and relationship mapping. Products like Spoke which has a network access to ~27 million people and the ability to leverage enterprise referral knowledge add a new accessibility to passive candidates. Jobster is set to come out of stealth mode with something  rumored to be relationship networking specifically for recruiters. Savvy talenteers have a whole new toolkit to use for sourcing.

- While the percentage of hires attributed to a company’s staffing pages is still inflated (we believe), evidence from a parallel study during January 2005 with CareerJournal.com suggests that “Virtual Walk-ins’ do indeed exist. Job seekers will go to company sites for reasons other than a job and find themselves drawn to openings and then to applying for them.

My 2 cents: By taking a more proactive approach to developing talent pools, not job applications, a far greater number of "virtual walk-ins" gets captured. This is the opportunity to start talent relationships with potential candidates who were interested enough to click on the career page link but may not find a job to be "drawn" to. This is the classic "coincidence hiring" syndrome:  it is a conicidence that the right candidate goes to the career site at exactly the time a job is open and applies. Odds are slim that if that job is not open, they won't come back for quite some time. Give them a way to create a job agent or profile of the ideal job without the position being open or applying for a job. That is sourcing ahead of demand and could increase the registration rates for virtual walk-ins by 10X to 20X.

- Hires attributed to the ‘Company Website’ (considered by us to be a ‘Destination’ and not a ‘Source’) have declined from 67% (of Internet Hires) to 54% this year.

My 2 cents: Gerry's parenthetical hits the nail on the head. The company career page(s) should not be purely a source, or simply a company job posting board--it should be a destination. All sourcing programs should direct candidates to the company career site destination. Better yet, the career site should consist of multiple destinations tailored to the unique needs of specific candidate types (engineers, sales, call center, field service, college, etc.) to offer a compelling candidate experience for each and every candidate. I guarantee that if companies took this talenteering approach to considering their career website as a set of experiential destinations, and notified matching candidates when interesting jobs became available, that the % of qualified applicants from the corporate career pages would increase and so would the quality of candidate.