The latest UK Candidate Attraction survey reveals the sourcing channels most likely to succeed in each industry sector

Eploy is pleased to announce the release of the 2019 UK Candidate Attraction Report. Now in its fourth year, the report shares top recruitment trends and behaviours across the talent acquisition landscape. It is an in-depth analysis of which sourcing channels generate the best results, by industry and company size and further insights on ways to succeed with candidate attraction.

This year’s survey was the largest yet with almost 900 UK recruitment professionals taking part, and the latest research is now available as a 76-page report. It looks at how both agency and in-house recruiters are attracting talent and which promotional activities, channels and sources are helping to fill their roles.

The report presents the results in sourcing quadrants that plot each candidate sourcing channel based on the quantity and quality of candidates each generates. The top right quadrant, for example, are sources of plenty, high-quality candidates. Whereas channels in the red quadrant provide insufficient numbers of candidates – often of lower levels of suitability for the roles advertised.

What are the top-level findings and key themes of the survey?

Key findings:

• The ability to measure sourcing channels effectively remains low - one third don’t (or can’t) measure each channel. The research shows that to maximise channel effectiveness, recruiters need access to analytics to review and improve the performance of each channel.
• Advertising your salaries can impact the number of candidates applying but may not affect candidate quality.
• Candidate sourcing challenges are broadly similar to previous years. However, new challenges added for 2019, such as Brexit hiring issues and job location are having an impact in specific sectors.
• Candidate scarcity continues to be the number one challenge, affecting 64% of in-house recruitment teams. This is a major issue for Legal; Science & Pharma; Construction; Engineering and IT sectors in particular. There are also differences in the size of organisations – 70% of SME’s facing this as an issue and 52% of larger (10,000 FTE) organisations.
• Recruitment Marketing is under-utilised. It seems Social Media is used by 73% to complement job postings, yet the results from Social Media as a sourcing channel are disappointing in many cases.
• With only 45% of organisations having an active talent pool nurturing strategy, in-house recruiters are still far more likely to seek new candidates rather than approach candidates they have talked with in the past.

New this year is the analysis of sourcing channels based on the seniority of roles – helping you identify the best places to promote your vacancies for entry-level, mid-level and senior positions.

You can download the free report and review in detail the strengths, weaknesses and usage of core recruitment sourcing channels such as job boards, careers site, job search engines, employee referrals program, social networks and more.

Bruce Groves, Marketing Director at Eploy, commented on the report launch, “We were delighted to get our biggest ever response to the annual UK Candidate Attraction 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 for planning talent attraction strategies for 2020 and beyond”.

Download your copy of the report today to form part of your recruitment, talent and HR strategy.