Current market-conditions pose the ICT-sector experiences more and more difficulties to attract good candidates. Recruiters, as your humble servant, have to use all their experience & creativity in order to find the ideal candidate being at least three-lingual, having a master or engineers-title, understanding ICT and its logic, but also understanding what the business-users want and being socially skilled enough to understand their logic.
As we’ve seen during the last decade, things are rapidly evolving and so is recruiting. The time we could rely on a job-add in one or another newspaper, ask the mass of applicants to send us their curriculum vitae (CV) and a handwritten motivation-letter is far away and will never come back. So we have to adapt, which we did, but in stages, and not always fast enough. First we adopted the typed letters send by snail mail, later on we discovered the advantages of e-mail and we saw the first steps of the jobboards. Off course some of them where smart enough to hook a cv-dbase to these jobboards and so companies got a real new channel of finding resumes. They paid a fee to all major boards, hired trainees and let them search in these dbases.
While the other evolutions still relied on the basic logic of placing an add and receiving cv’s, the resume-dbases made the switch from purely passive waiting for incoming candidates, to a more active search for the good candidate. And so HR-departments got more power to find exactly the candidate they wanted and so to give their company a competitive advantage.
Since the rise of the resume-dbases, the web has changed tremendously, we saw the shift from the one-way communication from computer to user, to the interactive Web 2.0, but only very few, pioneering recruitment & selection-departments are following. In a previous piece I tried to attract attention to Jobs in Brussels, as far as I know, the first real Web 2.0-enabled jobsite, but there are other, still underestimated possibilities. LinkedIN for instance, in Belgium more than 99.400 users are registered, a large part of them working in ICT, but if we look at the number of jobs posted in Belgium we only find some 46 vacancies (two of them for the Flemish Parliament) . One of my contacts took the test, yesterday I got the question to forward a very generic Unix-admin job to my contacts, I selected three of them, and already the same evening two of them sent me a mail to thank for the opportunity and to let me know they applied. Wow!
Did you know Ziki, the search-engine specifically aimed at finding people, or do you prefer to look in del.icio.us for those people having some specific technology bookmarked? What about your Second Life-presence or did the hype not deliver what it promised? Do you know you can post jobs on the Bejug-site (BElgian Java User Group), ok still in bèta, or are you more looking for the ITSMF-profiles?
Did you ever use LinkedIN or any other interactive web-tool to recruit, and if yes what were the results? Plz let me know.