Looking for staff? Forget print ads

Want to find a good candidate for a job? Ignore print. A new study from Classified Intelligence in conjunction with ERE Media, which looked at human resource executives, revealed that print ranked the lowest when it comes time to finding good candidates. “Statistically and anecdotally,” editors with Classified Intelligence wrote, “print advertising is an ineffective medium for recruiting candidates.”

The study, published on US newspaper trade site Editor and Publisher, found 70% of respondents said print was either “very ineffective” or “ineffective”, a result up from 60% in 2006. Only 14% of the 170 recruiters polled said that print was a good way to find employees.

But job boards also had a problem. The big online job sites, CareerBuilder, Monster and HotJobs, received a 3.2 on a scale of 5 points – five being the most effective means of reaching out to potential employees.

That is down slightly on 3.3 points in 2006, because recruiters are increasingly frustrated with the number of unqualified and bogus resumes.

But that won’t change buying patterns. About 88% of respondents said they intend to budget the same amount on national job sites as they did in 2006. However niche sites are the new hot trend, outranking the national job boards. HR executives gave it an average score of 3.4 versus national job sites at 3.2.

Niche sites were one of only three types of advertising that ranked higher year-over-year, the report says.

Also hot are employee referral programs, ranking at the highest – a four – out of all other ways of finding job candidates.

And recruiters were in love social networking sites because they can snare “passive” candidates, though it ranked 2.6 in terms of effectiveness.