Finding the right balance
December 1, 2011 12:41 PM written by Lee Biggins 
2 Comments
Earlier this month I attended the UK Recruiter End of Year Conference. CV-Library had a good presence there, as the main sponsors, and it was great to be out of the office and speak to people face to face. It was organised as a conference rather than an event so I found I learnt a lot and could take away more than a few new business cards.
I was involved in a debate at the end of the day where I was on a panel joined by Matt Alder and Jeremy Ovenden. The floor was open to ask any questions and I knew I was going to be grilled on the effect social media has on job boards. The industry talks about little else at the moment and I can safely say job boards are here to stay. Job boards haven’t stopped delivering; CV-Library is receiving more CV registrations and job applications than ever before!
It was a challenging debate but the main point I wanted to stress was that you must ensure your internal communications and job board strategy are right before you even start to think about social media. In my experience, and what friends in the business have shared with me, an awful lot of staff take advantage of social media. I touched on this in my previous blog post: Recruiting through social media…Is it a hindrance or a help?, and I’m still working on finding the right balance.
Social media can be very clumsy and without a clear plan of how to incorporate it into your recruitment strategy I still believe it can be a complete time waster. Take LinkedIn for example, recruiters can use this network for active headhunting but how often do they reach a brick wall? I have a profile on LinkedIn but I’m not a jobseeker. CV-Library has a database of over 4.2 million CVs from people who are all actually looking for a job. Catch my drift?
That is a fair argument Lee but I suppose the likes of LinkedIn think they will replace job boards over time as the model is dated. I suppose we just have to wait and see. Even facebook claim to be killing off LinkedIn when it comes to being used as a candidate seeking tool.
Hi Lee,
interesting article and I’m sure it was a lively debate at the conference.
I completely understand your point about people on job boards are actively looking for a job. However, it would be interesting to know the percentage of CVs on the job boards that have been uploaded more than 6 months ago. The issue here is that the data on job boards can often be incomplete as the candidates have since gained additional qualifications and work experience. That said, the job boards are still and excellent tool.
The benefit of social media sites, especially LinkedIn, is that people have a ‘live’ profile of what they are up to. Furthermore, with advanced search techniques and other tricks, you have access to a very large pool of people. If the sites evolve this concept I do personally think they will at least be a major competitor to the job sites.