Where are the candidates? or Where do you find your employees?
September 23rd, 2004
Heather’s blog alerted me to a BusinessWeek online article in which they talk about increased competition for Monster.com. This, of course, was on the heels of the announcement of eBay acquiring a minority interest in craigslist. (See Craig’s personal take on this here.) This reminds me of an article I read last December on how Monster was launching a new ad campaign so it could try and remain the market leader.
During the last couple of years, I’ve hired for several types of positions including developers, technical writers and quality assurance analysts. Given the downturn that we had in the economy, I assumed that there would be a plethora of candidates, ready to pounce on any job postings that we put on Monster.com. After all, shouldn’t there tens of thousands of saved searches that would find all positions with titles of “C++ Developer?”
Well, the results of using Monster.com were disappointing to say the least. We did receive some qualified candidates, but they were few and far between. It shouldn’t be surprising that the vast majority of the applicants were not at all qualified for the positions posted; what was surprising was how few page views the job postings ever received. A couple of statistics that I collected earlier this year:
Number of page views for job postings on Monster.com:
| Posting date | Job title | Page views |
|---|---|---|
| April/May 2004 | Senior C++ Developer | 636 |
| April/May 2004 | Junior – Mid-level C++ Developer | 1160 |
What’s going on here?
- Was the job market better than we thought?
- Have many candidates left the market for other careers?
- Do folks who are currently employed assume that the market is so bad that they don’t bother to look for other positions?
- Has everyone left Pittsburgh and no one wants to move here?
- All the above?
I really wish that I had collected better statistics along the way. I do know that a QA position we advertised had significantly fewer page views than the developer positions and that an ad that we posted on Dice.com produced few candidates at all and none of them were qualified for the position.
We also posted these job ads to the Technology Council website. This is a free service to member companies and is very low cost to non-members. The results:
Number of page views for job postings on Monster.com:
| Posting date | Job title | Page views |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2003 | C++ Developer | 1579 |
| April/May 2004 | Senior C++ Developer | 153 |
| April/May 2004 | Junior – Mid-level C++ Developer | 334 |
Why is there a huge drop in the number of page views in the span of 4-5 months? Did the economy improve that much?
Even with only a quarter of the page views, the number of qualified applicants was significantly higher than when I used Monster.com. From now on, if I am recruiting locally for a technical position, I’ll keep my $300 (or whatever it costs to post on Monster.com) and advertise for free. Of course I’ll also continue to work my own network to find good candidates—Pittsburgh is a small town…
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