The job market continues to tighten. In fact, 73% of staffing directors say competition for talent has increased since 2005, while 79% expect it to intensify further this year, according to "Slugging Through the War for Talent: Selection Forecast 2006-2007," a joint report by Monster Worldwide, Inc. and Development Dimensions International (DDI). Their findings reveal that current labor market conditions lend credence to these staffing directors' expectations; more than half (51%) of hiring managers are encountering fewer qualified candidates available today than they did two years ago.

In a tight job market like this, expediency governs hiring managers' decisions. New findings on industry-wide source of hire (SOH) activity reveal that hires from informal, as well as internal, channels are the go-to sources for most open positions.

• Seventy-three percent of managers say their companies consider internal candidates in order to fill job openings before looking at anyone else, according to a national poll of 2,024 U.S. workers (conducted by Hudson and compiled by Rasmussen Reports, LLC, an independent research firm).
• The conversion rate on internally-sourced leads is strong, according to other industry research. Indeed, companies are able to fill nearly 35% of open positions by tapping internal movement and awarding promotions, according to the "CareerXroads Annual Sources of Hire (SOH) Survey," a white paper based on a study of 40 retail, technology, transportation, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and finance firms that filled a combined 188,062 positions last year.
• For external sources, hiring managers often go to referrals, which comprise 26% of all hires, according to the same white paper by CareerXroads, an international Human Resources consulting practice.
• Networking is another bastion for potential hires, especially for workers who command yearly salaries of $75,000 to $100,000. According to the Hudson poll, nearly two-fifths (39%) of these workers—many of them management types—found their current jobs by networking.

Recruiters may safely conclude that, by far, traditional channels harbor the largest pools of quality new hires in this tight labor market. But the issue then quickly becomes how to reach these sources, and this is where tactics might eschew tradition. According to its Web site, LinkedIn alone is home to 10 million experienced professionals, representing 130 industries, from around the world. The level of referral networking that online communities of such size generate is surely significant. As they mine for candidates in a tight labor market, recruiters at once have an opportunity to follow tradition and break with it.