Can You See Your Candidates?

Through my normal pre-work reading of various blogs (mentioned in previous posts!). I came across the infographic below on +Jim Stroud's blog. That post was focussed more on the legal side of social media. However for the sourcing community there were a number of interesting points.

How visible are your candidates?

Of these points the ones I found particularly interesting were the 1st and 2nd ones. 

The first is about the number of adult internet users who are on social media - roughly 70%. That leaves a massive 30% of potential target candidates unavailable through internet search. 

The second point is the more important for me, it's about the percentage use of different age groups:

If the roles you are working on are towards the junior end of the market - 18-29 then luckily for you 83% of the candidates will have an online profile meaning that only 17% are a little more tricky to get hold of.

If however you're working the more senior end of the market in terms of experience then you'll probably be looking towards the 50-64 category. Here you'll only find 52% of the candidates with online profiles. Clearly this leaves a huge proportion of the potential population unavailable. 

Of course these above numbers are absolute and don't correlate with the amount of profiles that are actually findable (within the short periods of time that we are given to complete a sourcing project). Along with this caveat is that within different sectors these numbers fluctuate wildly with some having little to no online presence and others having a very strong presence.

What is a Sourcer to do?

Once you realise the number of candidates that are unavailable through internet searching of any kind there is for us one main option. That main option is to get on the phone to look to understand the size and structure of the target teams and begin to map out the potential candidates that we are missing. I won't go into the methods in this post but if you want further reading I'd recommend looking up +Maureen Sharib and her many posts on the subject!

How would you go about finding the other half?