At last, someone confessed to reading the BRANDEblog.

I'm engaged, inspired and ready to write.

Today's journey started with an email from SHRM about the internet becoming the leading source of hiring. Hmm that was interesting. So I followed the article back to the root directory which was from a Booz Allen study. The facts were based on a small sampling (77 respondants) but the statistics include

• the quality of applicants sourced on the web is getting higher
  
• the percentage of candidates sourced from the web is growing is getting higher (51%)
• employee referrals are still the best, least expensive way to get candidates
• but aha- the company's own website is growing in importance!

As search engines become more sophisticated, and job aggregators like Indeed.com and Oodle.com are pulling jobs from corporate websites, your own corporate careers portal is a great place to spend a bit of extra money in pumping up the quality and messaging.

Then I met with the Smart Talented folks from Newsday/CareerBuilder and got a REALLY GREAT article on the 2006 Outlook for Online Recruitment Advertising. (Thanks Jeff).

Newspaper ads are down, job boards are up, Craigslist is sweeping the nation- and niche boards are doing really well. Online recruitment advertising tripled in 2005. A bit more on Craigslist- it has 17.5% market share in LA (Monster is 9.9%). In fact, by listings, its the second largest job board, second only to America's Job Bank.

But there are new strategies too!

Mkt10- matches jobs with job seekers only when they have the credentials
JobKabob- another match-maker
H3.com- The external, automated employee referral game where everyone's a winner.

It makes Jigsaw, LinkedIn, and resume databases seem like yesterdays news. (It is.)

There's so many tech trends to include in devising a ubiquitious way to stay top of mind with top candidate choices that it looks like I'll need to spend more time reading at home.