Bogged down by Spiralling Cost of Job Portals? Follow these 3 Smart Sourcing Steps and Dramatically Cut your Job Portal Costs

When you get a JD to work on from the client pause for a moment and ask yourself how many times have you worked on this kind of position in the past?Or how many times has your colleague said she working on a similar position? More than you care to remember, right?

Now imagine if the team had a Resume box in the room in which you could dip your hand each time you got a JD and take out a bunch of resumes matching that requirement. No logging on to Job Portals, applying the same search for the nth time, download the same 50 resumes again and finish off your portal subscription.

Well this is not a fantasy. The Resume Box is a central resume database which can provide quality candidates when your team needs them with minimal cost. But how do you create it?

• Create a shared folder on one of the computers in your organization, say, “Resume Central”
• Under this create sub-folders related to the skillsets/positions on which your team works
• Establish the process of each team member “packing” every resume they source including direct submittals, job portals into the relevant folder

The key here is to make the effort to build a valuable internal resume bank that can be leveraged for unique resumes – across different verticals. Then make this the first stop of your team for sourcing candidates.

Keep in mind that Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) are available which make this whole process of creating your Resume Box even easier by automatically downloading resumes from multiple sources directly into a central resume database. Consider going in for one of these.

OK, now every team member is religiously saving each resume they source into that central folder that you created in the previous step.Your Resume Box is growing – but I hear you say “What’s the big deal? The team still has to logon to Job Portals and get the latest resumes. I’m still using up my portal inventory, right?”

Well, yes. But now there’s a difference. Once resumes start piling up in your Resume Box give the 2nd Commandment:

“When working on a JD first go into the Resume Box and apply a search – if and only if this search doesn’t give the candidate you want should you logon to the Job Portal.”

With this you’re making sure that each recruiter will dip their hand into the Resume Box (and more often than not get what they’re looking for) before thinking of logging on to Job Portals.

This will directly result in lesser number & frequency of Job Portal logins, bring down unproductive usage and avoid duplication of work by eliminating same resume downloads by multiple recruiters.

This is about bring a change in the way your team thinks about sourcing candidates – make sourcing activity a longer term effort rather than just filling the current job order and moving on.Lay down the policy of focused usage of Job Portal logins wherein recruiters use a login in a targeted manner only for doing bulk downloads for specific job requirements. All of these resumes should be directly stored into your centralized Resume Box.

This directly reduces the number of Job Portal logins – since these are now used only for downloading into your central database.

So take the crucial step and establish a policy of creating and using an internal central resume database.

Better still invest in resume database management technology which will deliver a powerful solution to optimize the value of Job Portals.

Is your staffing process suffering from Job portal-itis? What strategies have you come up with to save your Job Portal costs? Do share your insights – we’d love to hear from you.