IT recruiters are looking for niche skills — yet they appear to be looking in the wrong places. This is according to the results of Curo Talent’s IT Talent Acquisition: The Candidate’s View.
Experts aren’t easy to find — and this is certainly true in IT recruitment. As per the results of the results of IT Talent Acquisition: The Candidate’s View, specialist job boards are the main resource IT workers use to find contracts.
However, recruiters haven’t best exploited these niche platforms. Could recruiters be overlooking the industry’s most elite talent?
Recruiters tend to rely on generalist job boards to find candidates, such as Reed, Monster and Indeed. While there’s certainly value in these platforms, they are not necessarily appropriate for recruiting senior IT professionals.
Senior IT workers prefer to turn to specialist job boards to find their next role. In fact, the results of Curo Talent’s survey suggest the most popular online job board is JobServe.com — hailed as the number one site for IT jobs. 27% of respondents named this as the best, trumping recruiting giants Reed, Indeed and Monster.
However, when asked the same question, just 6% of IT hirers believe JobServe.com provides them with the best candidates for IT.
The recruiter’s edition of this study, IT Talent Acquisition: The Recruiters View 2019, suggests that hirers are still relying on more generalised boards to recruit specialised talent, with the aforementioned ‘big players’ of online jobs boards among the most popular.
This makes sense, as in-house recruiters have limited budgets and are searching for a wide range of job titles – everything from sales manager to receptionist and finance director to delivery driver. They need a broad job board and don’t have the resources to use specialist websites.
Surprisingly though, social media platform LinkedIn came out on top as the most effective online job board for hirers, with 19% naming it as the best method.
In contrast, 30% of candidate’s state that they have never found a job on social media. In an industry in the centre of such a dire skills shortage, there’s clearly disconnect between these two groups.
Thankfully, there’s something they both agree on — recruitment agencies are the best channel to use when finding a new job or great candidates.
For in-house recruiters, online job boards cannot replicate the advice and counsel of a specialist recruitment agency. Because these agencies use the specialist job boards frequented by IT experts, they have access to CVs that most hiring managers never see.
Candidates see recruitment agencies slightly differently. By creating and maintaining a relationship with a specialist agency, they know their CV will rise above the mountain of applicants because the hiring manager has confidence in the agency’s recommendation.
“IT Talent Acquisition: The Candidates View 2019 provides insight into the state of IT recruitment from the perspective of both contractors and permanent staff – the other side of the interview desk” explained Graham Smith, head of marketing at Curo Talent.
“Comparing the results from the candidate’s report with the recruiter’s report, it’s clear that some hirers are not hunting where candidates hang out.
“In an industry experiencing such a severe skills shortage, changes need to be made to ensure hirers aren’t overlooking appropriate candidates by relying on generalised jobs boards.
“For specialist IT roles, these boards won’t do. We recommend a combination of specialised jobs boards and spending time to establish a relationship with an expert recruiter in IT.”
