Carl Bradford

A whitepaper’s – The ninth Source of Hire report from CareerXroads – key findings report that, on average, 41 of the country’s larger businesses filled just over 50% of their job vacancies in 2009 by internal transfers and promotions.

That’s the greatest percentage since CareerXroads first reported the information in 2002.

Regarding 2010, however, 48% of the participating businesses believe they will hire and hire aggressively. The prediction is for a 29% growth in hiring. Only 10.8% of the interviewed employers anticipate hiring a lesser number of employees in 2010. Compare those percentages to the Source of Hire Report issued a year ago and you will discover that 100% of the businesses forecasted they would employ fewer employees.

The reports authors, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler attitributed this to an increase in internal movement resulting from the US economic downturn, thus effectively obscuring many other sources of hire.  They expect internal movement (promotions and transfers) to return to more typical levels in 2010.

Another key finding – and something recruiting managers and Human Resource professionals need to quickly get a handle on – is that 30% of the respondents were unaware for the size of their contingent labor force.

Amazingly, the survey preference selected from the 30% was that we “do not really know and can’t even guess” the size of the contingent employed pool. Of those who did report a size, the average was 13.6% of the labor force was considered contingent.

Another very interesting thing discovered is that forecasts call for these businesses to increase their contingent staff size to as much as 25%-35% in the coming years.  If that is correct, this only serves to point out that the HR and recruiting staff professionals have a very big ‘disconnect’ that has to be resolved.”

It should be pointed out however that the majority of the reports results deals with the source of employment of full-time staff.

As Crispin and Mehler have reported for the last eight years, referrals are the largest supply of external hires. Not only were 26.7% of the external hires produced from recommendations from their workforce (who are the reason for the largest share), vendors, alumni, customers, and the like, but referrals are a powerful applicant resource.

A side note: If you’re reading this summary report, and are an active job seeker, this is a big, big clue on how to bypass the traditional recruiting application process and get recommended by an insider.  What, you don’t know anyone? There is a strategy for getting past that hurdle, but that’s part of what I coach my candidates on how to do.  You’ll need to contact me for that level of advice.

Just how effective is the referral system” “The yield for referrals is one hire for each 15 referrals, making this category essentially the most effective source by far and away,” say Crispin and Mehler.

Close to referrals, company job sites, at 22.3% of the total external hires, produce the most hires.

This is likely due to the fact that job seekers find the organization website from elsewhere; probably from the search engines or perhaps a employment post website link or an email from a friend.

Add these two top percentages together and you discover that 49% of all external hires come via referrals and the company website.

You’re probably wondering where job boards weigh in on source of hire.  The report indicated that job boards averaged 12.3% of all external hires.

Now the total for all three sources are 61.3%.

That leaves almost 39% of hires from other sources. Part of the difficulty in reporting on the 39% of external hires can be attributed to HR’s poor tracking systems, a portion of it is traceable, but attributed to a host of smaller sources.  One of the emerging sources is social media, but the ability to track that is still being developed.

LinkedIn accounts for 60 percent of all hires attributed to social media. Now, again if you’re a job seeker this is a big clue you must utilize in your job search.  The problem is, very few job seekers really know how to maximize LinkedIn’s effectiveness beyond the obvious.  For those that do, it is a treasure-trove of job opportunities, often yielding job opportunities with little or no competition.