Market Research: Candidate Attraction Survey Findings

As we continue to work in a situation that is constantly changing how we recruit and operate, many organisations recognise the need to truly understand their recruitment strategy and work more effectively to find the right quantity and quality of candidates. Some sectors struggle with candidate scarcity, others face huge volumes of applications or struggle with most effective channels that work to place candidates.

What are the key challenges?

Eploy’s annual candidate attraction report aims to discover how in-house recruiters are attracting talent and which promotional activities, channels and sources are helping to best fill their roles.

The report analyses the relevant strengths, weaknesses and usage of core recruitment sourcing channels – in particular, they look at the experience of recruiters within different industries and company sizes – under 250 FTE, 251 – 1,000, 1,001 – 5,000 and over 5,000.

The top challenges in candidate sourcing change and evolve over time and once again, scarcity of qualified candidates is among the biggest challenges in many industries, but companies are increasingly struggling to cope with the volume of applications for their advertised roles.

The impact of the last 12 months will surely see recruitment budgets impacted in the coming year. The survey results revealed that over the next 12 months, 19% of respondents expect their level of hiring to decrease. They also see that 35% of recruitment teams face a reduction in their recruitment marketing budgets for the next 12 months.

What are the top sourcing channels?

For the first time since launching the survey five years ago, Employee Referrals are toppled as the #1 source of candidate quality, with Professional Social Networks (LinkedIn) nudging ahead (and doing a better job with quantity too!)

Eploy also noted improved results from pro-active talent pools – with 56% if in house teams now nurturing passive talent through their CRM/ATS (up from 45% in 2019). Once again, Social Media ranks lowest from candidate quality and quantity, whereas Job Aggregators like Indeed are the clear leader for providing volumes of candidate applications.

The heroes effect?

Poor candidate perception can challenge candidate sourcing and this year the survey has seen a huge improvement in candidate perception within the Health & Social Care Sector as well as Transport & Logistics. Could this be the Heroes effect as a result of the pandemic? You can read about this and look at segmented data across 18 different industries in the report.

Get your free copy of the report!

The Candidate Attraction Report has been fundamental in assisting recruiters and talent acquisition teams to work smarter with how and where they attract candidates.

Bruce Groves, Marketing Director at Eploy, commented on the report launch, “We were delighted to get another great response to the Survey. We hope in-house recruitment teams across all industries and company sizes will find the full report a useful resource to benchmark their own experiences with their sector peers and improve their strategy for sourcing the optimum quality and quantity of candidates.

We’d like to thank all of the recruiters who took part in the survey and look forward to seeing how candidate sourcing channels, strategies and tactics develop over the next twelve months.”