Rather than sit back and wait for applicants to send resumes, companies areproactively targeting prospective employees on digital platforms and social media,often with a recruiter's help, says research by

Rembrand Koning

When it comes to the job hunt, many of us have a traditional view of what it takes to find a newposition: A worker searches for available openings, sends in a resume, and waits for an interview.

Much of academic research assumes that$$s the way people find jobs, too. From mathematicalmodels to field studies, researchers tend to think that workers submit resumes to open positions.In fact, scholars have learned a lot about discrimination in labor markets by sending resumes tojob postings to see

who gets called back and who doesn$$t

As Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Rembrand Koning was talking about suchstudies with colleagues Ines Black and Sharique Hasan from Duke University$$s Fuqua School ofBusiness, however, something about that model didn$$t seem right.

$$It really didn$$t jibe with how a lot of people seem to be getting jobs today,$$ says Koning, amember of the Strategy Unit. $$They$$re not sending resumes in$.$ They$$re being recruited, oftenthrough online platforms like LinkedIn.$$

Indeed, the rise of digital platforms now enables firms and recruiters to source potentialcandidates anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes. Instead of waiting for a worker toapply, firms can now hop on a platform and pick out talent they think would be an especiallygood fit for their needs.

When Koning and his colleagues set out to learn how many workers were being recruited versusapplying for jobs directly, statistics from the $1991$ General Social Survey were the best theycould find. The data showed only $4$ percent of workers were recruited to their current jobs, whileanother third found jobs through referrals, and the lion$$s share$$some $60$ percent$$applieddirectly$.$ Those figures seemed wildly out of date.

$$We said, $$Hey$,$ no one$$s measured this recently, so why don$$t we do our own nationallyrepresentative survey?$$ The result is a new working paper,

Hunting for Talent: Firm$-$Driven LaborMarket Search in America

$,$ that quantifies the steep increase in outbound recruiting by firmslargely at the expense of incoming resumes.

$08$ DEC $2020$

RESEARCH & IDEAS

Why Companies Hunt for Talent on Digital Platforms, Not inResume Piles

by Michael Blanding $.$The rise of recruiting

The researchers contracted the national polling company CivicScience to survey more than$13,000$ workers from a variety of industries across the country. They found that nearly $18$percent of workers were recruited to their positions by a firm or an independent headhunterworking on its behalf$$more than a fourfold increase over the last $30$ years. That number topped$20$ percent in some industries, such as in technology, and more than $25$ percent in somelocations, such as Silicon Valley.

$$We were expecting it to go up$,$ but not by that much,$$ Koning says. What$$s more, the number ofworkers finding their jobs through referrals stayed constant at about a third, meaning theserecruited workers were coming at the expense of direct applicants. $$People are still using theirpersonal networks to find jobs, but now the firm is doing much more of the searching.$$

Koning and his co$-$authors attribute this change to the rise in digital labor platforms over thepast decades, starting with Monster.com in the $1990$s$,$ and progressing through LinkedIn in the$2000$s$,$ and CareerBuilder and ZipRecruiter in the $2010$s$.$It$$s really taken $30$ years to see theseeffects,$$ he says.

The advantages are obvious for companies, which previously relied on their local networks to findviable candidates. Now, with a few online searches, they can identify ideal potential employeesaround the world.

$$If I$$m a company, I can just say, $$Show me everybody who knows how to program Python, hasfive years of experience, and went to these colleges,$$ and you have a set of everybody you couldpotentially hire,$$ Koning says..WITH THE RISE OF REMOTE WORK, FIRMS SHOULD CONSIDER$$HUNTING FOR TALENT$$ WITH BACKGROUNDS AND INLOCATIONS THEY MIGHT HAVE NEVER CONSIDERED."

Recruiting can be particularly useful, he adds, for smaller companies and startups that mightnot see the same flood of resumes as Google or Facebook but nevertheless have very specificqualifications in the workers they are seeking to hire.

$$If I$$m a small data science startup, I may need someone who knows a particular type of artificialintelligence framework, and now I can go out and find everyone who has the skill listed on aplatform like GitHub,$$ Koning says.

Workers can also benefit from the rise in recruiting. They might receive requests from companiesthat weren$$t on their radars but might provide them with the perfect job fit. On the other hand,candidates, particularly less experienced ones, may be competing with a whole set of workersbeyond those who applied directly. And, just like the resume studies that showed discrimination,this approach mig