The Recruitment Black Hole

An Ask the Expert feature with QuietAgent, Inc.

Jason Kerr, founder and CEO of QuietAgent, reveals how recruiters should be focusing on utilizing advanced matching capabilities to find the best candidates for new positions.

“In the current economic environment, more and more jobseekers are applying to fewer and fewer roles”
-Jason Kerr, QuietAgent

During these tough economic times, most companies have a recruitment problem.
I can hear the readers shouting now, “A recruiting problem? We’re not hiring.” This is a common misconception. Most large and mid-sized companies are always hiring, either to take care of turnover or to scoop up a star employee from a competitor.

In the current economic environment, more and more job seekers are applying to fewer and fewer roles, which leads to a number of problems. First, your internal recruiters are inundated with resumes, which they need to sift through. Most of those resumes are not qualified or appropriate, but companies don’t communicate with them, leaving them in the so-called ‘black hole’. Lastly, because of government compliance rules, these resumes sit inside a corporate applicant tracking system (ATS), driving the costs of these systems through the roof.

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.

To combat the brand damage caused by the recruitment black hole, 100 of America’s leading companies have come together to form AllianceQ, powered by online recruitment company QuietAgent, Inc. AllianceQ 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 candidates, AllianceQ members substantially enhance candidates’ opinions of the company, a huge benefit to future recruitment efforts as well as providing a positive experience for current and prospective customers.

In addition to the brand protection benefits, the members of AllianceQ get dramatic recruitment benefits. Utilizing unique candidate matching technology from QuietAgent, members are able to source candidates from each other, lowering costs substantially. Most importantly, 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’s Q-Filter technology offers companies a solution to address the escalating costs and the flood of resumes. By reducing the candidate flow to only the best matched candidates, 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.

Q-Filter enables recruitment to be a ‘laser’, not a shotgun. Employers can search to find job seekers who are well qualified, and want to do the job. Utilizing advanced matching technology from QuietAgent, both employers and job seekers do less work for a more relevant result in less time. Auto-Search agents continually look for (your definition of) the best candidates and can automatically ‘invite’ them to apply to your jobs. Your ATS now contains only those candidates who are qualified and interested.

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