Looking for a job on the web is the same as…

arriving at a lunch buffet at 3pm…

…you will be lucky to find crumbs off the table..!

I am not exaggerating, The internet is definitely not the bests shot and let me share with you the main reasons. First we need to understand how a recruitment process operates within a company. To do so, we need to place ourselves in the position of the person responsible for the recruitment in a company.

Let me tell you the story of Michelle…

Michelle works in a small sized but expanding company based in Luxembourg. She is responsible for the recruitment and the management recently asked Michelle to hire eight people for different types of roles, in different teams and at different levels of responsibility.

How does Michelle achieve this..?

1. Michelle will have a look at the HR database of the company, listing all the past candidates the company had contact with.

2. Then she will use her personal and professional network

3. She will communicate within the company (via the intranet) and ask for the employees to think about their network (some companies propose incentives for the recruitment of new employees – believe me, a premium of one thousand euros makes everybody a recruiter!)

4. She will put the open position on the website of the company (the results of this action are directly related to the traffic on the website)

5. Then she will do a research on LinkedIn and all the job board databases she has access to*. These are the first steps. If the quality and the suitability of the candidates are not good enough, Michelle will shift into the second gear and start investing money in the process to increase the quantity and/or the quality of the candidates.

6. She will publish the vacancy on multiple job boards on the web, selected by their relevance (the website you usually visit).

7. Lastly, if no good candidates are found, Michelle will call a recruitment agency to find the rare pearl and give them the task of managing the recruitment (depending on the company and depending of the profile, the agency can be contacted at the very beginning of the recruitment process to handle it). As you can understand, when you see the vacancy on the web it means that it may have been open for a while. I hear a lot of candidate, saying “I saw this brand new job, it was published yesterday!”. Now, having read this you will understand why I wouldn’t share my enthusiasm here. On top of that some job boards refresh “old” job ads every week.

Actually, it is very likely that the candidates’ interviews have already begun and that the recruitment process is quite advanced, and the more advanced it is the more complex it will be to integrate the process.

Conclusion:
Of course, you should continue to browse the job boards and apply on the web, but don’t forget to keep your CV updated on LinkedIn and to keep your ears open. The truth is, networking and keeping in touch with your industry is still the best way to be the first to initiate a recruitment process.

*For your information, when you put your CV online on the biggest job boards in Luxembourg, it is highly likely that the HR department of your company has access to these databases too, since they comprise a desirable pool of candidates. A word to the wise.