Lingering hiring freezes and close-scrutiny of overhead costs are forcing an increasing number of recruiters to develop and execute recruiting strategies on a shoestring budget. As companies begin to move away from pricey job boards, recruiters are left scrambling to find cost-effective (read "free" here) ways to both source and communicate with candidates. Although I am a devoted fan of social media sites, I always recommend a smorgasbord of options before words like Twitter, Xing and Friendfeed find their way into the conversation.
Social media can be intimidating and confusing even to those who consider themselves to be "tech-savvy." I would be doing both the recruiter and the social media site a disservice to recommend its use without being able to provide a comprehensive tutorial and personal walk-through complete with a Q & A session. Studies have shown that sites like Twitter have a high abandonment rate, meaning that users create accounts and then either cancel them or let them become dormant. Why? Because for many the purpose of the site seems abstract at best, and the most beneficial features are often perceived as hard to set-up. It is important to never assume that any skill set, regardless of how basic it seems to you, is universally intuitive. While I am referencing skill and knowledge sets needed to understand and deploy social media strategies, the same principle can be applied to knitting, fishing or skiing. I am the perfect case-in-point. While I can spend hours discussing Boolean, SEO, SEM and social technology, I cannot throw a Frisbee in a straight line to save my life. I have spent endless summer afternoons practicing, but this presumably basic skill has yet to click.
The truth is that job boards will always be one of the easiest way to access candidates. While the passive candidate is still a prized commodity, few recruiters, especially those who consistently recruit for a high volume of positions, have the time to spend writing Boolean search strings to sift through the Deep Web for obscure personal web sites, let alone cold-call into companies and convince fully-vested professionals to leave their jobs in a tumultous economy. It is for these reasons that I direct recruiters to a multitude of free (or very cheap) job boards. While they are not as well known as Monster and CareerBuilder, an increasing number of candidates are discovering them. Some of the most popular sites include:
