Over the past three years, the unemployment rate in the U.S. has wavered betweeneight and 10 percent, a far cry from the five percent or lower unemployment rate before the recession hit in 2007. Though the recession "ended" in 2009, unemployment remains high. Among the various macro and micro economic reasons contributing to the situation are the many inefficiencies in the job market that are keeping employers from filling their open positions in a timely and efficient way. The overall result is that the speed and effectiveness with which employers are able to fill their open positions are not making enough of a dent in the growing pool of job seekers.
My co-founders and I were consistently disappointed by traditional recruiting methods and technologies and found the overall sourcing and hiring processes extremely inefficient and mostly cost prohibitive. We built Simplicant to address these issues and remove all obstacles so startups and small businesses can have access to enterprise-level recruiting technology.
Entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses are among the most important and significant contributors when it comes to creating jobs and helping with an economic turn-around. At Simplicant, we are committed to building a platform that caters to companies of all sizes and removes all friction so startups and small businesses can get started easily, source great candidates and hire efficiently and effectively. When more employers are able to fill their open positions faster, the job seeker pool is depleted more rapidly.
Our social recruiting platform literally helps companies create and fill their open positions. From a job seeker perspective, we facilitate bringing a new job to the market and make it easily accessible and available for them to apply. Plus, we provide the platform and functionality that directly helps in reducing the time it takes to fill open positions. In other words, we make it possible for companies to hire faster, better and cheaper than ever before -- all of which directly help improve unemployment.
Our goal is to help companies accelerate their hiring, create a virtuous circle and contribute to the economy. Employers using Simplicant can cut the time spent in filling a position by at least 80 percent. For every new job created in a sector, its overall economic impact creates even more jobs in that community. This number varies for different industries. For example, for every new job created in the energy sector, approximately 2.7 additional jobs are created, in the farming sector the number is around 1.28, in the biotech sector it is 2.23 and so on.
To help the U.S. overcome the unemployment crisis, we at Simplicant hope to help create or facilitate the process of creating one million jobs by 2015. The total economic impact of this could be well over that number, probably closer to two million.
To do this though, we have had to tackle some major issues plaguing the hiring industry that do nothing but contribute to high unemployment. Below, I have outlined four of those issues and how we are solving the problem.
Hiring tactics can be costly.
A recent infographic shows that one bad hire costs many companies more than $25,000. With the current economic state, most companies think the risk is just too great to take that chance.
Our recruiting system not only optimizes the speed at which employees are hired (which cuts costs in itself) but because of its web-based functionality, the cost-per-hire is greatly reduced.
Current strategies for recruiting are inefficient.
With the ratio of job seekers to open positions close to a record high (there are not enough jobs available for three out of four unemployed workers), employers are faced with a huge challenge of dealing with a deluge of resumes for every open position. We have seen this as a consistent trend across various industries, sectors and geographies. As a result, employers are finding it extremely difficult to efficiently manage their recruiting process causing positions to stagnate and remain unfilled in spite of a lot of interest from candidates.
The fact is that finding the right fit for a company's open position becomes harder when you are not able to bring in the right candidates. The best way to fill your candidate pipeline with quality candidates is to use referrals. We provide a way to use social media for activating referrals within a company through employee networks and friends. Also, by helping employers get the word out about their open jobs through various channels, we get jobs in front of a large number of qualified candidates.
Old-fashioned recruiting practices are ineffective.
Traditional methods of acquiring talent rely way too much on old-fashioned practices that do not take into account that recruiting is a rapidly evolving field. It is greatly influenced by changing economic trends and the paradigm shift caused by social media. The way individuals and organizations interact and engage with their stakeholders has been completely redefined by social media.
This led us to building a system that elegantly addresses the most critical recruiting needs of today's growing businesses. We designed an integrated cloud-based platform that allows organizations to leverage the most effective and relevant methods of talent sourcing and candidate engagement while providing the best recruiting management functionality to streamline the hiring process. Most importantly, we are building a platform that can continue providing our customers with the most relevant recruiting methods even as new technologies are introduced and paradigms inevitably shift. Not to mention, our platform offers a space for better engagement between employers and job seekers. Recruiters will be less nervous about making a bad hire when they have thoroughly engaged the candidate beforehand.
Traditional hiring methods lack transparency.
What many job seekers do not know is that only 20 percent of them have the skills to fill 80 percent of the open positions. Unfortunately, the lack of proper engagement and interaction between employers and candidates does not provide much useful information to candidates that are not selected. Candidates are often left guessing why their application was not selected. Was it their skill set, experience, education or some other reason?
By providing a way for employers and candidates to better engage with each other, we help increase transparency. Using messaging and automated templates, employers and recruiters can easily provide candidates with a better understanding of where they are in the process and what it takes for them to be considered for the next step in the process. When they know what skills they need in order to be relevant in the job market, job seekers will be more proactive about acquiring those skills, which will lead to more options in their job search.
One of our clients recently said, "Simplicant has made the difficult process of recruiting so simple that we now look for the 'Simplicant' of every complex problem we see outside of recruiting."
So what's the "Simplicant" solution to solving the unemployment crisis? Unfortunately there may be no one easy fix for this. But by revolutionizing the recruiting process by making it less costly, inefficient and ineffective, we are improving the employment outlook faster than you would imagine.