Industry heavy weights Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler will be releasing their 9th Annual Source of Hire report on Friday US time on the CareerXRoads web site. I was lucky enough to be sent an advanced copy by Gerry.
Once again the reports details where corporations in the US found their employees during 2009, this year they look at 176,420 hires.
While the report is not generally available I will share some of the results with you below. However beforehand please note the the quote from Gerry and Mark that appears at the beginning of the document:
If the reader assumes that the data sliced and diced in this whitepaper is truly representative of where firms find their hires in the US, then you will have missed our point entirely. Indeed, this whitepaper, which we have published now for nearly a decade, is constructed as a lab report to examine the problems and the promise of how well corporations measure one part of the staffing process.
Our intent is to hold up a mirror so firms can look at themselves and their increasingly critical and vulnerable supply chain. Vendors can help, but only if staffing leaders are disciplined enough to do their part and get vendors to focus on needed changes as a priority.
So on with the results.
Internal Hires
51% of all hires were internal movement or promotions. Indicating the continued trend of internal talent management activities around succession planning and development. The report highlights that one of the stated employee value propositions (EVPs) of most organisations is to develop their employees. A result of around 51% of hires through internal placement tends to indicate that these organisation are fulfilling this development promise.
The bad news in Australia is when compared to the 2009 Sources of Talent Report it was found that only 6.29% of hires were through internal promotion. What does this say about how Australian employers fulfill their EVPs?
External Hires
75% of all external hires came from 5 sources:
- Referrals
- Career Site
- Job Boards
- Direct Sourcing
Referrals have been consistently the number one source of external hires for the last five years.
When comparing to the Australian report referrals were the number four source of external hires, at only 7.57% of all hires. Once again there is a huge opportunity for Australian organisations to increase their use of employee referral programs instead of continually relying on the “post and pray” approach through job boards. Don’t know how to do referrals, check out our ebook.
Direct Sourcing/Internal Recruiters
One very interesting area of the report is where they try and define what is direct sourcing. As part of the survey they asked the participants what do they consider direct sourcing to be, the options:
- Mining our internal ATS for candidates who have not applied
- Mining external candidate databases for leads we can convert into prospects and candidates
- Researching profiles on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook etc
- Developing Search Engine Marketing campaigns to create prospects from leads
- Cold Calls/contacting individuals from internal or external research
The results are shown in the table below.
Given internal recruiters are the second largest source of hire in Australia what do you consider direct sourcing?
Further Thoughts
Throughout the report Gerry and Mark write about many of the same challenges Phillip Tusing and I encountered when preparing the Australian report. For example, the devil is in the detail and it is very hard to keep everyone working on the same definition of each source. And even if you place a job in print it will still end up online, so is that a job board or print source. What is a source vs a channel, or a tool vs a process?
At the end of the report that provide some good suggestions on how we can all improve the tracking and usage of source of hire data. These include:
- Fixing the inherent issues with candidates self reporting source
- Deciding where the source starts, in the channel or at the destination
- Look at additional methods to capture source of hire data to supplement self reporting
- Understand patterns in your source data
- Implement more discipline in process and practices
I would highly recommend you go and download the report when it is available.
Michael Specht 
@Michael: A very insightful information you have shared..Seeing Referrals on the top seems that recruiters don’t pay attention towards the talent assessment, that is an integral of a talent management. I think that hiring through referrals can be costly for a company, because, sometimes, it’s not necessary that you hire a quality or matched talent for a particular job. What I suggest, that recruiters must take advantage of pre-employment test for the growth of their company.
Having worked for two large Australian companies, I have some difficulty with the survey result of less than 7% of positions being filled internally. Certainly at both these companies the results were in fact better than US numbers of 51%. In fact, our HR KPI target measure was 80%.
It is well known that labour turnover in Australia is far less than in the USA. As such, we also need to factor in the fact that job losses thankfully were less severe in Australia. In absolute numbers, we are therefore talking about significantly less numbers as a ratio.
Many companies have good processes for internal advertising of vacancies, but I have to agree with Saleem that better assessment of talent is a real opportunity for business to improve the quality of appointments.