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When Is a Job Board Not a Job Board? When It Is an Influencer

The most recent Career Xroads Sources of Hire survey was released recently. If you are not familiar with it, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have been conducting this study for over a decade. The survey looked at data from 36 companies with over 200,000 job openings to determine the key sources of hire and the interrelationships between key hiring sources.

According to the study, the top four sources of hire include:

1. Referrals (28%)
2. Job boards (20.1%)
3. Career sites (9.8%)
4. Recruiters (9.1%)

While job boards account for 1 in 5 hires, they are shown to have a much larger influence on the job seeker community through providing branding, visibility and a wider distribution for job postings.

More than 45.7% of the respondents said they were using job boards for ads, but not resume search. One reason for this is that many recruiters have not been trained in how to source candidates on a job board. All ClearedJobs.Net customers have access to complimentary tutorials on how to search and sources candidates on the Cleared Job Board.

With the explosion of social media applications and tools, it is surprising that only 3.5% of the hires were attributable to social media. LinkedIn did rank as the highest for being the most useful place to post jobs and search for resumes. The other important data included information about referrals; only 1 in 10 referrals resulted in an actual hire.

Gerry and Mark have to be commended for creating an in-depth study that has been conducted over 10 years to showcase the trends in recruiting, and for building the study to reveal the interrelationships between so many recruiting methods. As all great recruiting organizations know, building relationships across many platforms will yield the best results.