By Doug Berg, Founder & Chief Recruiting Geek, Jobs2Web

Doug Berg, Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, Jobs2Web, Inc.

Are you wasting a great recession and the possibility that it provides smart companies to cultivate relationships with future recruits?  As I travel around the country and meet with top companies to discuss their online recruiting strategies, I’m constantly surprised by employers’ attitudes: we don’t want applicants if there aren’t any specific recruiting requirements open.  This means no capturing any candidate interest whatsoever!

This “go away – there’s nothing here for you” sign that hung on career sites  hurts future recruiting efforts – especially when in today’s market, the number of candidates searching online for jobs and companies is at an all time high.  There are more than 225 million searches for any sort of “jobs” each month on Google alone, yet most of what is found by candidates is job boards advertising for them to “join” their boards – so that these same job boards can re-sell these same candidates to you at a future date.

In a recent report that I saw from one of the major boards, it reported that nearly 60% of the people who applied for jobs – where, in fact, people who had joined the board months prior, and had setup an email notification agent, which then emailed them a matching job, which caused them to return and apply for any particular job.

So if this marketing formula is working successfully for job boards, why wouldn’t major employers deploy this same type of resource on their own career sites?  Are the ATS vendors in today’s market so focused on narrow-minded “apply or goodbye” process oriented functionality? Or, are the compliance cops so terrified about having a database of “prospects” inter-mixed with the applicants that they won’t allow such a feature to exist within your recruiting strategy?

To show how overly aggressive (and go-away minded) we’ve become in discouraging applicants, I recently spoke to a group of unemployed professionals at a local unemployed group at a local church, and was amazed at the distain they have for the ATS systems and over-bearing application process that they experience every day.  One woman shared with me that she was only 3 steps into an application that had 10 steps when she accessed her email to get some information for the apply process.  Her rejection email was already in her email box, and she hadn’t even completed 50% of the application!

On the flip side, employers complain that they are getting an avalanche of applications through their ATS systems, which floods them with the requirement to respond to all these applications. Aren’t we doing this to ourselves?  If the ONLY way that candidates can show interest in working for our company is to apply for a job, then that’s the course of action they will take right?  But what if there was an easier alternative?

Many employers haven’t even considered the simple concept of offering prospective candidates the ability to enter their email into a simple employment newsletter integrated into your career site. By using email subscription services such as Constant Contact, you can begin to harvest email addresses of candidates from your site.  Another great option would be to setup a LinkedIn Group, a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter account for prospective employees.  This would allow prospective candidates to follow your jobs in the social channels, and provide you with a way to capture their interest. Your recruiters can post future positions into these channels, which auto-broadcast them to this pool of prospects online, helping to capture the initial interest of prospects, and recycle them when future positions arise, helping to leverage these easy tools to fill future positions.

Of course, the ideal solution is to setup a talent community option on your company’s career site for prospective candidates. This way they can join or “opt in” to show interest in your company without having to go through a full apply process.  These systems are automated job matching and marketing systems that allow prospects to establish precise job agents that send daily/weekly/monthly updates on exact jobs of interest for them. Unfortunately, this simple signup and job alert notifications aren’t available via most ATS systems (candidates must again go through a full apply process to set up this sort of feature – and it matches on their full resume which can provide some really bad results…none of us wants to hear about a job that we held 10 years ago!)

So, what are you going to tell your hiring managers you did during the recession when the recovery hits us?  Especially when dozens (or hundreds) of new requisitions hit your desk and need be filled immediately?  Do you tell your hiring managers that you need them to give you a recruiting budget so you can start spending money on job board advertising?

Or, do you tell them that during the recession you strategically captured the interest of thousands of prospects who visited your career site and showed interest in your company? And that now you’re going to harvest hires from that prospect network without spending a nickel?

Be the one who gives your company the competitive advantage in recruiting when the recovery kicks in!