Closing the ‘Black Hole’ of Recruitment

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 due 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.

Most companies don’t realize the negative message that this lack of communication (read ‘respect’) sends to the job seeker, who is also a prospective customer, or even an existing customer. 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 business’ brand, its relationship with its customers, and its future revenue, by perpetuating The Black Hole.

While implementing a recent project, I was talking to a senior recruiting executive about this very subject, and asked him why they don’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.”

So 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?.....”

I then asked him: “Does marketing know about this?......”

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 volumes of applicants as it is. But with the current recession, amid record layoffs, job seeker volume is massive, and that alone demands a change in approach.

So what is the opportunity in the crisis? You should use these tough times 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.

To combat the brand damage caused by the recruitment Black Hole, one hundred 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 job seekers, AllianceQ Members ensure that the candidates’ opinions of the company remain favorable - a huge benefit to future recruitment efforts as well as providing a positive experience for current and prospective customers.

AllianceQ Members do this by offering their unsuccessful job seekers an opportunity to share their anonymous résumé 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.”

Job seekers that take up the Member’s offer, join QuietAgent and create an anonymous résumé that can be matched and found by employers inside and outside of the Alliance. 

It’s a message that is striking a chord with frustrated job seekers. 67 percent of the job seekers who are referred to and visit the AllianceQ website, have created a QuietAgent anonymous résumé.

As part of this “continuing-care” philosophy, QuietAgent ensures that every time any employer searches, every single job seeker résumé 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 résumé.

In addition to the brand protection benefits, the Members of AllianceQ get dramatic recruitment benefits. Utilizing unique 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, as a sourcing technology, is a ‘Laser’ in a world of ‘Shotguns’. QuietAgent can search through 10 million résumés and deliver the top 10 exact matching job seekers based on explicit criteria…. in seconds.

The last thing recruiters want, are more résumés…what they need is faster ways to focus in on the ‘quality’ ones from among the résumé populous. To help this, QuietAgent uses a unique structured résumé process, where 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 in 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 (has the 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.

However, I hear the readers shouting “Who needs another sourcing tool in this economy?”, and 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 ATS systems are bursting at the seams.

Costs of running the corporate ATS system are 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.

The Internet is a great and wondrous thing. At the outset, online recruitment pioneers told us “The internet will deliver candidate quality and quantity” – well they got it half right. It delivered quantity, but 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 got trebled by the current economic crisis.

QuietAgent’s Q-Filter module offers companies a solution to address these problems of quality and quantity. By reducing the candidate flow to only the best matched and interested candidates, Q-Filter significantly increases the performance of an ATS 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 and provides an exclusive QuietAgent database that allows job seekers to build a QuietAgent format anonymous résumé, to express interest in working for the company.  Q-Filter removes the cost of hosting, storing, managing (and in most cases the liability), of hosting mass job seeker information, and takes it away from the company.

When the company is hiring, they ‘laser’ search their private QuietAgent database to find the exact matched job seekers who are well qualified, and want to do the job. Utilizing the advanced matching technology from QuietAgent, both employers and job seekers end up doing far less work for a more relevant result, in much less time.

QuietAgent Auto-Search agents then continually monitor the database and look for (your definition of) the best candidates, and can automatically ‘invite’ them to apply to actual jobs openings in your ATS. Your ATS now contains only those candidates who are qualified and interested.

The results and impact of Q-Filter on a large organization can be significant.  The ability to free up recruiter resources (in some cases by 80 percent) 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 their candidate experience, help fix the ‘Black Hole’ of recruiting and protect their corporate brand and retain future customers.

When job seekers join a company who is using Q-Filter, the job seeker creates a QuietAgent anonymous résumé.  Because the job seeker résumé is now in the QuietAgent format, the company can offer those job seekers that they cannot hire, the opportunity to share their anonymous résumé information and be found by AllianceQ Members, and any other employers.

Job seekers who take up this offer need only a single click of the mouse to share their anonymous résumé, and are assured in the knowledge that they are only being found and matched to jobs they want to do, when they have the skills the employer needs.

Q-Filter, combined with the QuietAgent Matching technology, gives large organizations a strategic platform with which to build an end-to-end quality candidate experience, that drives down the cost-to-recruit, respects the candidate, (can) help the wider community to recruit, and ensures the corporate brand retains its luster.

A recent Deloitte study entitled “Aligned at the Top” finds that, although HR leaders and executives view people as a critical issue, there continues to be a disconnect between the strategic needs of the business and HR’s ability to deliver. “The survey results suggest that there is still a gap between the senior business executive’s view and the perceived capabilities and programs being promoted by HR. At the moment, most HR functions appear to have the administrative side pretty well covered. But the survey shows the strategic people agenda is not being addressed by HR.”

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 Recruiting departments the ability to use advanced technology to shift their focus and increase their ability to deliver the strategic human capital objectives of the business. This capability is now within reach of us all.