There are many tools recruitment agencies use to source candidates, and in the age of the internet these are evolving all the time. Here are the main sources of candidates available at present.
General jobs board advertising. There are now a handful of very large 'general' jobs boards. The term general refers to the fact that they operate across all job sectors. The main job boards of this type are enormous in terms of traffic, visitors and number of applications going through the site. One such site would be monster.co.uk for which the name is very apt. The benefit of these boards is that they can give you huge exposure for job adverts. The down side is that you can find you get a very large but non specific response. This can be a particular problem if you are operating in a niche sector.
General jobs board CV search. Most large jobs boards allow recruitment agencies to search their CV database using specific search criteria. This can be a much better option if you are a niche specific recruitment agency looking to avoid a large and non specific response. Using search facilities it's possible to notch up a good short list in a relatively short space of time. They have also got much better at ensuring that candidates returned on a search are genuinely up to date job seekers. the down side here is that due to such easy access, you may be one of many, many recruitment agencies getting in touch with these candidates, leading to you investing time only to loose out when someone else places the candidate.
Paper advertising. Within the last decade this was the only main source of CVs yet it was hugely expensive in comparison to today's internet prices. the benefit of paper advertising is that it can provide an excellent profile in the market place. There is certainly something about having your brand image appearing glossy magazines which portrays recruitment agencies as one of the lead players in the market. In terms of candidate delivery, the paper adverts results are now dwarfed by the comparably cheap internet packages available.
Niche specific jobs boards. In principle this is the most targeted way of recruitment agencies generating Cvs in their own sector. Smaller jobs boards dedicated to a particular sector are more attractive to both candidates and recruiters in that sector, and indeed will likely be preferred over general boards by google in it's listings for phrases relating to the sector.
Resourcing agencies. This is a more recent resourcing tool for recruitment agencies and is often outsourced to Asia. These are agencies which perform the early part of the recruitment process for consultants. they have access to an array of job databases, and given a job brief from an agency they will use this to generate a short list of candidates for the agency, short cutting the first part of the process and reducing the necessity to invest in advertising themselves. The down side of this is that you are asking people unlikely to be skilled in your sector to do part of your job for you, and this may not work in niche specific sectors.
In practise, the current trend is for recruitment agencies to spread themselves over many sources to generate their candidates. With the internet and it's technology developing so quickly, there will likely be more and more tools available to attract candidates in the coming years.
