"It's the typical recession reaction whereby companies want to cut or freeze staffing levels, but not at the expense of losing good people or hiring top-flight contributors," said Rob McGovern, CEO of Jobfox, the Internet's first career site to bring precision matching to online recruiting. "The companies that will emerge victorious will be the ones that are most resourceful in managing cost-efficient recruitment activities."
Despite the growing list of corporate layoffs throughout the country, employers continue to post millions of new jobs each month. For example, there were 2.5 million non-farm job postings in November 2008, the most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That same month, 4.3 million non-farm new hires were made, even with overall unemployment at 6.5 percent.
While hiring continues, however, recruiting budgets are under closer scrutiny with 48 percent of in-house recruiters expecting to operate with decreased budgets during the first half of 2009. Meanwhile, recruiters say they are inundated with job seeker applications.
"Right now there's a lot of unemployment and saturation of the job market, so we get a flood of resumes that don't have anything to do with what we're looking for," said Kobie Drew, the account acquisitions manager for Citysearch, a leading online lifestyles guide. "There are more and more resumes to look over."
Employers such as Citysearch are turning to more efficient recruiting solutions to control overall recruiting costs without sacrificing opportunities to make high-quality hires.
