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We're in the middle (or, perhaps more likely, the beginning) of a revolution in human communications greatly impacting everything from commerce and entertainment to crime and warfare. We live in a new digital world (pay phone or map book, anyone?) that surrounds us. This technology has permeated our daily lives, growing and changing hourly or, at least, monthly (BlackBerry or MySpace, anyone?).
This new environment offers both new benefits (Internet search technology) as well as new hazards (personal online reputation management) and new skills (personal search engine optimization).
This is a brave and dangerous new world that has changed traditional recruiting and job search so completely that it may be unrecognizable.
As documented by a 2015 study by PewResearchCenter, the perception held by a wide portion of the population is that the Internet is a short-cut to a new job. (1) Or, it is the only way to a new job. So people spend hours on job boards applying for jobs, which is too often a waste of time.
According to the Pew study, the Internet is the first place Americans go to find a job:
Fully 90 percent of these recent job seekers have ever used the internet to research jobs, and 84 percent have applied to a job online.(l)
Yet the 2015 SilkRoad Sources of Hire Report documented only 39 percent of hires coming through job boards (e.g. CareerBuilder), job search engines (e.g. Indeed), or corporate websites. (2)
Dr. John Sullivan wrote an extremely interesting article for eremedia.com in 2013, Why You Can't Get a Job...Recruiting Explained by the Numbers. (3) In it Dr. Sullivan highlighted some mind-blowing information:
* An average of 250 resumes are received for each corporate job opening.
* The first application is received within 200 seconds (3.3 minutes) after a position is posted.
* More than 50 percent of applicants fail to meet the requirements of the job they applied for.
* Recruiters spend an average of 19 percent of their time reviewing applicant LinkedIn Profiles.
* Between 30 and 50 percent of all recruiting efforts are classified as failures - the person didn't accept the offer or the new hire quit or was terminated within the first year on the job. So, we are using technology more...