Help me analyse a market, in this case the job-market from the perspective of employers. My questions are several in fact, but I think some of the answers are contained in following paragraphs and hopefully your comments. The questions:

1. Do employers benefit from high visibility of their job-openings?
2. Are job-adverts a push or a pull-phenomenon? I.e. do employers prefer to control who sees what or do they not care and instead implement barriers from within?
3. Is there an advantage to the highly inefficient job-forms that the larger companies and temp-agencies seem to use (with zero-compatiblity between them)?
4. Is there such a thing as best practice in recruiting?

There’s several scenario that I’m thinking about here. The simplest one is that if you release an advert into the open, you also want plenty of people to see it. In this scenario, employers enjoy maximum visibility.

Another perspective is to look at it from the administrative overhead that comes with each applicant. Let’s say, you want a CV and a letter. Then for each CV, you need a good 2-15 mins and for each letter the same. That’s 30 mins per applicant. You need to make a short-list of applicants that meet your requirements and then invite and schedule each one for an interview. Pretty soon, for every shortlisted applicant, we’re talking about half a day’s work. Of course, looking at the way large companies do it, there are a number of short-cuts to take, such as:

• ask applicants to enter their CV into a form, which makes reading multiple applicants at once a little easier.
• ask applicants to come on an open day and create scenarios where you can evaluate them in different settings.

There’s a third perspective, which I call “the right person for the right job” scenario. Here, I assume that the company already has a pretty complete profile (beyond the X years of experience and degree Y buzzwords) of a person that they want to work with. For instance, you may want someone local, someone who has worked at one of your competing firms in the area, and who has an education at the local school. For this exercise, I’m thinking farming, but I’m sure this works with plenty of other industries. The advantage of such an individual is that they have experience in both the job and the context in which the job operates, as well as probably being cheaper. Here it makes sense to seek applicants in a targeted fashion, e.g.. through your network or through your local newspaper. Of course, if we reverse some of this, e.g. you want someone global, you on the other hand, want a higher visibility of your job-opening. The same if you want someone highly specialised, but of which there are only a few available to you globally.

Another factor: the economy. If there is high unemployment, employers naturally want prevent a large inflow of applicants. Here, I’d say that the no. 1 way of recruiting is through your own network, as someone will probably know someone that is looking and hopefully qualified.

Ignoring the last factor, my answer to this question is that companies which are small and operate on a small scale do not benefit from high visibility of jobs. And companies that are small and operate on a large scale, the same, as both do not have the internal resources. Only companies that have found an efficient way to manage a large number of applicants and/or who can afford the time-consuming process (usually larger companies), can afford high visibility. And for them, there’s still the difference between local and global employees. My assumption is that global companies (want to) have less ties to local environments as they relocate operations dynamically according to environmental conditions (costs, resources, etc.). Thus they will always prefer a high visibility of job-openings.

Your input?
Vincent