At the end of the year we invited recruiters to fill out a detailed survey about recruiting trends.

To gain attention among recruiters we feared we would need to go on LinkedIn and tag it “MIT Full Stack Developer Seeking Job”, but many of you kindly completed the survey without us needing to take this step! Most people completed the survey anonymously, but the people who did leave data indicate that the sample was somewhat diverse, from boutique recruiting shops to internal headhunters at Fortune 100 companies.

Searches: Technical vs Non-Technical Recruiting

Our respondents were overwhelmingly focused on technical searches:

82% of all all searches were for technical hires.

58% of respondents were searching exclusively for technical talent

Just 12% of respondents had exclusively non-technical searches

Search Results

Recruiters had a very productive 2019 — or at least they claimed they did when completing a survey anonymously.

The average recruiter made 45 placements throughout the year, skewed upwards by some super-recruiters (the median number of placements was 30)

23% of respondents made 100 or more placements — the highest reported number was 150

30% of respondents made 10 or fewer placements, with the lowest reported number of placements at 2.

Note that most of the respondents who had very few placements had only worked as recruiters for less than half the year, so it’s plausible their numbers will pick up in 2020.

Applicant Tracking Systems

The ATS landscape remains highly fragmented.

The most popular ATS was Bullhorn, but this did not even crack the 20% mark.

The only other besides Bullhorn ATS to get more than 10% of respondents were Workable, Taleo, and Greenhouse

Only one respondent used multiple ATS, every other respondent claimed to only use a single ATS

One poor sap is still using Google Hire — but we promised not to reveal their name for fear that they would be swamped by cold calls from ATS salespeople!

Sources

The sourcing results were very interesting. We asked respondents to estimate the percent of results that came from various sources. We normalized their responses to 100% and used the data to generate the following results:

LinkedIn is the plurality, accounting for 38% of hires

is the plurality, accounting for 38% of hires Job Boards landed second by a nose, accounting for 23% of hires

landed second by a nose, accounting for 23% of hires Referrals and word of mouth took third with 22% — the top three sources (LinkedIn, Job Boards, Referrals) combined for 83% of hires.

and word of mouth took third with 22% — the top three sources (LinkedIn, Job Boards, Referrals) combined for 83% of hires. There was a steep dropoff for the next category, Events / Job Fairs , which accounted for 6% of hires

, which accounted for 6% of hires “Other” accounted for 5% — we asked respondents to specify but nobody did.

accounted for 5% — we asked respondents to specify but nobody did. Tech Sites (ie Stackoverflow, Github, Meetup) accounted for 4% of hires

(ie Stackoverflow, Github, Meetup) accounted for 4% of hires People Aggregators (ie Connectifier, Talentbin, Entelo, AmazingHiring) was the most scarce, accounting for about 2% of hires

We saw pretty significant differences in sourcing methods between the respondents who focused on technical hires versus non-technical hires:

Recruiters who were not focused on technical hires were far less likely to utilize LinkedIn, with far greater emphasis placed on Job Boards, Referrals, and Events/Job Fairs.

We also broke these down by the self-reported “success” of recruiters (ie whether the recruiter was in the top 20% or bottom 20% of number of hires) to see some interesting results:

LinkedIn is the most popular source among all recruiters, but the “super-recruiters” who claim to be make over 100 placements per year. In contrast, the recruiters who made fewer than 10 placements relied very heavily on LinkedIn, accounting for a full majority (59%) of their hires.

Less successful recruiters also found just 4% of their hires on job boards, while other recruiters used job boards for 23% of their hires.

Successful recruiters relied a bit more often on word of mouth and referrals than less successful recruiters. Given that many of the less successful recruiters had fewer than 4 months on the job, it’s not a big surprise that they had not built up significant clout in the industry.

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future success. Just because one source has worked for successful recruiters in the past does not mean that entry-level recruiters will also see the same results. We observe that many of these entry-level recruiters are reporting more success with “tech sites” (ie Github, Stack Overflow) than high-volume recruiters. One could interpret these data to mean that LinkedIn is “overfished” while these tech sites represent an underutilized opportunity. One could alternately interpret the data to mean that the difference in success is simply the skill at navigating LinkedIn. We look forward to hearing your thoughts throughout 2020!

Other Comments

We asked respondents to optionally provide their thoughts on what trends they expected to see in 2020. Generally, most people respondents felt the major trends would be growth in the use of technology in recruiting. Specific replies included:

Diversity

Automation

Recruiting data and visualization to become the norm

Use of AI in recruiting

Text recruiting

Contracts

Purple unicorns

Candidate Driven Market

2020 and Beyond

We wish all of you happy hunting in 2020! If you found this interesting, you may also be interested in trying out our Red Balloon job bounty board, a new concept we pioneered in late 2019 that has seen very fast growth. We provide a public platform to allow anybody to post bounties to the general public to help with sourcing, only to be paid out on success.

As a recruiter, we expect you could utilize Red Balloon as a new channel to help with sourcing — you could offer a percent of your placement bonus to the general public to be paid out if and only if they help you find somebody. Alternately, if you connect with candidates that you cannot place, you might try referring them to over $200K in open bounties as a way of earning incremental revenue. Given the rapid growth, we expect “bounties” may make an appearance on our charts when we run this survey again at the end of 2020.

If you have any questions or comments, or would like access to our source data, please feel free to email us at jobs *AT* rezscore {DOT} com