Closing the ‘Black Hole’ of Recruitment

With job losses at record highs, more people are applying to fewer jobs than ever before. The result is an overwhelmed recruiting staff and strained applicant tracking and HR systems, which means less and less control over the quantity and quality of potential employees. QuietAgent has developed a solution.

The Black Hole
It's called "The Black Hole." At least, that is what job seekers call it. It's what happens when a job seeker arrives at your company's employment web site, applies for a job, gets a pithy "thank you for applying" email, and then nothing. Nothing for days, nothing for weeks, nothing at all.

Most job seekers complain that the Black Hole is their single biggest frustration when looking for a job online. "Aren't I qualified? Are they interested in me? Why won't they communicate with me?"  Remember when you were a teenager, waiting for that boy or girl to call?  We all thought those feelings of self-doubt would evaporate once we grew up and got a real job.  We thought that people would treat each other with respect.  Not so in the recruiting world it would seem.

Think about it. A person spends 20 to 30 minutes on average applying to a job on a corporate website.  They get emotionally involved in the process. They take the time. They jump through all the sometimes extensive hoops to put their "name in the ring." They feel good.  They're ready for the fight. They feel like they are doing something positive, something good for their career ... THEY WANT TO WORK FOR YOU ... then ... nada.

The Black Hole of recruitment isn't just an HR problem, it's a marketing problem, as well. Today's job seekers are current and prospective customers, as well as being future job seekers. One major bank discovered that two-thirds of its applicants were account holders at the bank. Imagine the damage that can be done to a company's brand, its relationship with its customers, and its future revenue, by perpetuating The Black Hole. Better candidate care leaves seekers feeling good about your brand as a possible employee and customer. This improved treatment is not altruistic, it is good business.

While implementing a recent project, I was talking to a senior recruiting executive about this very subject, and I asked him why his company doesn't communicate with every job seeker who applies. He said, "We used to communicate with every job seeker, but a couple of senior hiring managers got a phone call from a disgruntled job seeker or two, so we stopped the whole process."

I asked him: "How many applicants do you get a year?" 1,500,000. "How many interviewed or hired?" 10,000. "Hmmm, how many negative phone calls did you get?" Less than 20.  "I see ... so, you're risking turning 1,490,980 people against your brand, because you got 20 phone calls?" (Silence.)

I then asked him: "Does marketing know about this?" (More silence.)

The current economy is only increasing the recruitment Black Hole. More and more job seekers are applying for fewer jobs, increasing the pool of unqualified applicants. In normal times, companies have trouble coping with the volume of applicants as it is. But with the current recession, amid record layoffs, the volume of job seekers is massive, and that alone demands a change in approach.

So what is the opportunity in the crisis? You should use these tough times as a chance to change internal process and re-look at the way you treat job seekers, because one thing is for sure, when the economy turns and you need to start hiring again, you're better off fishing in a candidate pool that loves your flavor of bait.

AllianceQ
To combat the brand damage caused by the recruitment Black Hole, our online recruitment company QuietAgent brought together 100 of America's leading corporations to form AllianceQ, which enables the member companies to provide job seekers with the opportunity to be matched to more appropriate positions with other employers.  By providing "continuing-care" for job seekers, AllianceQ Members ensure that the candidates' opinions of the company remain favorable - a huge benefit to future recruitment efforts, which also provides a positive experience for current and prospective customers.

AllianceQ Members do this by offering their unsuccessful job seekers an opportunity to share their anonymous resume information with other members in the AllianceQ network, as well as any other employer looking to hire.

The Member is saying to their unsuccessful job seekers, "While we cannot offer you a job today, we do want to introduce you to our friends in this alliance who may have something for you right now." It's a message that is striking a chord with frustrated job seekers.  Sixty-seven percent of the job seekers who are referred to and visit the AllianceQ website, have created an anonymous resume that can be matched and found by employers inside and outside of the Alliance. 

As part of this "continuing care" philosophy, QuietAgent ensures that every time any employer conducts a search, every single job seeker resume in the database is evaluated.  As a result, every job seeker is always at the "top-of-the-pile," and just because you joined three weeks ago does not mean that nobody is seeing your resume.

Better Matching
In addition to the brand protection benefits, the Members of AllianceQ get dramatic recruitment benefits, too. Members are able to source candidates from each other, lowering costs substantially. Utilizing unique candidate matching technology from QuietAgent, the candidates are precisely matched to the Members' job openings based on skills and career ambitions. This matching is done in an automated fashion, which hugely increases recruiter capacity and simultaneously reduces time-to-fill and overall recruiting cost.

QuietAgent, as a sourcing technology, is a "laser" in a world of "shotguns."  QuietAgent can search through 10 million profiles and deliver the top 10 job seekers who make an exact match, based on explicit criteria ... in seconds.

The last thing recruiters want are more resumes. What they need is a faster way to focus in on the 'quality' resumes from among the populous.  To help this, QuietAgent uses a unique structured profile process in which information is solicited from job seekers rather than having the job seeker upload a document full of information they "think" a recruiter will want to know.  The result is the ability to "laser focus" a search on the two or three exact candidates a recruiter needs.

The QuietAgent match process further reduces the workload for recruiters by ensuring that any candidate returned in a shortlist can not only do the job (i.e., they have the proper skills, etc), but that they want to do the job, too.  QuietAgent only matches when a job seeker has the exact skills the employer needs, and the employer can offer a job and career that the job seeker wants. Result: recruiters only spend time with quality, interested candidates. Because QuietAgent profiles include candidates' work styles and desires, "cultural fit" goes way up, which improves employee retention.

However, I hear the readers shouting "Who needs another sourcing tool in this economy?" Fair enough, because the common view right now is: "We're not hiring. We don't have a sourcing problem." But, you do! In the current economic environment, more and more job seekers are applying to less and less roles, and corporate applicant tracking and HR systems are bursting at the seams.

Cost Control
The cost of running a corporate ATS system is increasing. Hosting, data storage, privacy and compliance needs, are all increasing, and the capacity of the recruiters to fill urgent positions is decreasing due the additional volume.

Of course, the Internet is a great and wondrous thing. At the outset, online recruitment pioneers told us that "the internet will deliver candidate quality and quantity." Well, they got it half right.  It delivered quantity, but NOT the quality.

Your ability to control the quantity and quality of applicants entering your ATS and applying to your jobs (even if they are not qualified to apply) is largely out of your hands.  And that problem just became more significant by the current economic crisis.

Even if companies are not recruiting or have decreased their recruiting, QuietAgent's Q-Filter technology offers companies a solution to address the escalating costs and the flood of resumes. Q-Filter significantly increases the performance of an applicant tracking system, reduces ATS hosting and data storage costs, can reduce privacy and data compliance issues, and significantly frees up recruiter time, in some cases, by more than 80 percent.

How? Q-Filter sits in front of the corporate ATS, providing an exclusive QuietAgent database that reduces the candidate flow to only the best matched candidates. Q-Filter removes the cost of hosting, storing and managing (and in most cases the liability) of handling mass job seeker information.

The results and impact of Q-Filter on a large organization can be significant.  The ability to free up recruiter resources so they may concentrate on hiring and retaining the right person are incalculable. More tangible are the savings to be made by substantially reducing your corporate ATS volume and operational costs. 

But perhaps the most exciting piece of Q-Filter is that it too enables a company to improve a candidate's experience, helps to fix the 'Black Hole' of recruiting and protects corporate brand in order to retain future customers. Companies using Q-Filter can opt to direct those unqualified candidates to join the QuietAgent job-matching network, enabling them to be found by many other hiring companies.

Q-Filter, combined with the QuietAgent sourcing network, gives large organizations a strategic platform with which to build an end-to-end quality candidate experience, which drives down the cost-to-recruit, respects the candidate, helps the wider community to recruit, and ensures the corporate brand retains its luster.

Using QuietAgent technologies, the AllianceQ Members are solving the Black Hole problem, helping their customers, protecting their brands and cutting costs. Most important, they are improving the skills and fit of their new employees.

QuietAgent provides companies with next generation matching technology, a huge source of candidates through its partnership with AllianceQ, and a system for candidate care. Using QuietAgent, companies can cost effectively and continuously source the best candidates, as well as take care of candidates and customers for the future.