UK 
United States
The past 12 months have presented numerous challenges that required recruitment and talent teams to evaluate their candidate attraction strategies to reach the right talent.
Eploy and HR Grapevine surveyed over 700 recruiters (84% in-house, 16% agency) to determine the candidate sourcing channels and recruitment marketing techniques that deliver the best results. The survey asked In-house and agency recruiters across all industries to rate each of their main sourcing channels based on the quantity and quality of candidates they typically generate. In this insight, we share the high-level findings of the recently published 6th Annual UK Candidate Attraction Report.
Sourcing channels surveyed include company
website/career site
talent pools
professional social networks
generalist job boards
specialist job boards
events
social media
employee referrals
CV databases
job aggregators
programmatic advertising and
PSLs.
The complete report charts responses within a ‘Sourcing Channel Quadrant’, enabling recruiters to identify the effectiveness of each channel in each sector/industry as well as by company size.
Some of the key findings in the report include:
1. Candidate scarcity remains the #1 challenge for recruiters
The lack of suitably qualified/skilled/experienced candidates is still cited as the biggest recruitment challenge, rising back to pre-pandemic levels and affecting 70% of organisations. Building a diverse and inclusive workforce is also a key challenge for candidate attraction. The most significant year-on-year change is recruiters struggling with a lack of brand awareness, which affects 36% of companies (up from 25% in 2020).
Plugging the skills gap with upskilling
Upskilling current employees to fill those hard-to-fill roles is the top choice for plugging the skills gap for 71% of in-house recruitment teams, and nearly half (48%) are turning to candidates from other industries/sectors.
2. Careers site content is improving
The most successful company careers sites now contain more candidate focused content to help candidates make informed decisions and promote employer brands (there is a whole section on this subject in the report, see pages 32-35). Organisations that rate their careers site highly for attracting good numbers of quality candidates have invested in candidate-centric content.
3. Employee Referrals are top for candidate quality
Last year Employee Referrals were knocked off the top spot for candidate quality by Professional Social Networks like LinkedIn but returned to the top of the quality pile this year. However, each sourcing channel has its strengths and weaknesses with sector and company size differences.
4. Increased budgets or more with less?
Across all industries, the survey found an expected increase in hiring levels in 2022 over 2021. Over 80% of in-house recruiters within industries such as Science / Pharmaceuticals, Hospitality / Leisure / Tourism and Marketing & Media expect significantly increased hiring this year. In addition, many recruitment teams report an increase in their recruitment marketing budget or at least no change from the previous year. But whether this will be enough to satisfy the demand for new hires remains to be seen.
Get your free copy of the report
The detailed 79-page report is available for download, completely free to all UK recruitment teams. It provides excellent insight into the challenges and ways of working across all sectors.
A big thank you to all 700+ talent acquisition and recruitment professionals who took part in the survey.
