Along with Quality of Hire, Source of Hire is starting to take center stage in the talent acquisition world. The annual report tracking and analyzing Source of Hire from CareerXroads is out today. Sources of Hire 2013: Perception is Reality contains truly interesting data – understandable and actionable. And the authors ask some really important questions about B2D (Big Bad Data) and how to measure the pre-application talent supply chain.
Early in the whitepaper, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, the principals at CareerXroads, show the following chart of source of hire data from 1997 – collected by SHRM and EMA (now part of SHRM).
Talk about a blast from the past! Newspaper ads generated the most hires at 28.7% of hires and Agencies – both contingent and executive search – generated 12.5% of hires. My how the world has changed. Here’s the 2012 data:
Print has fallen from a combined (newspaper and trade journals) 32.9% to 2.3%! “Internet” has grown from 2.1% (had Al Gore even invented the internet in 1997?) to a combined (career site, job boards and social media) 44.4%!
There is a lot in which to be interested in comparing these two charts, so have fun.
There nuggets of pure gold in this whitepaper. Two in particular stood out to me. The first is the expectation for increased hiring in 2013.
If true, we’re about to see a whole lot of domestic hiring! The national hiring figures are trending slowly upward, but at the same time we read in the press that the implementation of the new health care rules is retarding hiring in the small business sector, the sector credited with being the job creation “engine.” This will be interesting to watch. Will the need for growth overcome the risk and costs associated with that growth?
The second nugget is the reminder that the source of the majority of hires is the pool of existing employees.
The whitepaper accurately points out that internal movement and promotion are higher during difficult economic periods – and this is evident in the graph above. However, a steady increase in this category may also be due to the perception of a growing skills scarcity in the outside talent market.
Enjoy the whitepaper. And begin to ask yourself some of the questions posed by Gerry and Mark. Questions like…
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How comfortable are you defending the 2013 plan for your budget, recruiters, technology tools, partners, vendors, training and your sources to your peers and colleagues?
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How much should your 2013 recruiting strategy include improving your collection and analysis methods?
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Are referrals the best source of hire?
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What “Sources” interact with each other the most?
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How can I collect Source of Hire data?
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Thanks for the shout out.
Its worth noting that the 1997 stats never attributed hires to a ‘phone’ because it was just assumed to be a part of the technology toolkit. (In those early year’s I used to ‘count’ the number of ads that offered email options and then provided ‘links’ to complete an application…even thought ‘the internet’ was barely noted as attributing.)
Now it would be worth understanding the growing influence of social media and mobile underlying all the categories we attribute as a source- even though few hires are ‘attributed’ to these tools. We really need to develop a completely new taxonomy to define the elements of how prospects are influenced at various points in the supply chain.
It’s fascinating, data, Gerry! I think we get confused between tactics and tools a lot. Many see social media as a tactic instead of a tool and so measuring tactical success gets really complicated as you point out.
And the 1997 chart was a gem!