The Smartest Strategy to Recruit in a Tight Labor Market

Unemployment is 3.9%. There has only been one period in the last 60-years that the unemployment rate was (sustainably) this low: the late 1960’s. Great news for the U.S. workforce. Scary news for recruiters.

There are more job opportunities than there are bodies to fill the roles. Prior to now, that just wasn’t a thing. It’s never happened.

No one expects you to twiddle your thumbs and wait for the next economic disaster. What is expected of you, recruiters and sourcers, is to think way, way outside of the box.

Okay, maybe not way outside of the box, but definitely get a little more creative. Let’s kick off this recruiting strategy sesh with a cold, hard fact:

LinkedIn is not your best friend.

Take off the friendship bracelet, everyone. And hey, no hard feelings toward LinkedIn or anything. It’s just super limited in the amount of data it can give recruiters based on a number of factors:

• Profiles aren’t updated
• Job titles are misleading (don’t get me started)
• Contact information is missing
• Job functions are easily fudged

Heck, some of the best candidates out there may not even have a LinkedIn account. So why would you put your eggs in one basket? Well, you wouldn’t. Not with an unemployment rate that’s less than 4%. What you need to successfully recruit passive candidates in 2018 is a real solution—one that’s been around for 6 decades: in-depth recruitment research.

What is recruitment research?

Think of recruitment research as passive candidate research on steroids. It involves digging beyond than LinkedIn, Google, Facebook (especially since the privacy change) and any other online database out there. See, the problem with those tools is that every recruiter has access to them. You’re all swimming in the same pool. This isn’t to say that recruitment research teams don’t use those resources—it’s just that they use other, more intimate strategies to obtain passive candidate data.

Now, I’ll be honest: accurate recruitment research gets a little big brother-y at times.
… except it does a lot of good for recruiters, candidates, and organizations.

Why is recruitment research better than LinkedIn?

It reveals data like the first and last names of your competitions’ top performers, direct lines of communication to those top dogs (up-to-date email and phone numbers 🎉), job functions, current job titles, reporting structures—the works.

Face it: LinkedIn can’t do all that. And neither can your other secondary online candidate sourcing tools. You sure don’t have the time to do it either because the recruiting life is, well, pretty rough sometimes.

Anyway, it gets even sweeter. Let me break it down for you.

First, just know that recruiters don’t have to do any of the dirty work. Typically, research firms hunker down with organizations to learn their market and target candidates. Then, an in-house research team does the dirty work, and when it’s finished and checked for accuracy, they pass it off to the organizations’ recruiters (i.e. you or your team). What recruiters do with that data is totally up to them: start recruiting right then and there or stow it away to help build a candidate pipeline.

You don’t have to ditch traditional recruiting strategies

I would never tell you to abandon all of the recruiting techniques you know and love. LinkedIn may not be your best friend, but it’s still a nice acquaintance. The most efficient way to use recruitment research is to make it work for you or your team. Decide how much you want to be involved. Want to be hands-off? That’s fine. Just a little hands-off? That’s fine, too. Still want to recruit and pass on your findings? Sure, go ahead.

When the goin’ gets tough, take advantage of recruitment research

Record low unemployment rates have created a labor market that’s more competitive than ever. Recruiters are going to fret even more about making placements and the hours spent sourcing new passive candidates will seem longer. The battle is far from won, but if we want to keep recruiting in this new era, traditional recruiting strategies just won’t cut it. Consider alternative solutions. Those are the only ones that’ll keep you or your recruiting team above water.

Don’t ignore the solution in front of you. Get a hold of Qualigence International.