Reverse Posting by the Numbers

• Author: Kyle Callahan
• Posted: October 27, 2009
• Category: Recruitment Communications, Tools and Resources, Sourcing Strategies
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A few weeks ago, we launched ReversePosting.com to promote a sourcing method that flips the traditional concept of recruitment advertising on its head.

If you want to know more about what Reverse Posting is and how it works, head over to the web site. But right now, I’d like to share some numbers from a recent project that gives insight into why we say that Reverse Posting works.

First, some background.

The customer for this particular project makes things like soft-drink mixes, frozen juice bars, gelatins and puddings…you know, “fun foods.” They had an opening for a bilingual Quality Assurance Specialist working the third shift at a plant about 50 miles west of Chicago. And they wanted us to help them find their candidates.

Now, as you may or may not know (if you don’t, go to the web site), Reverse Posting is a three-step process. First, we use our proprietary search technology (RCI Talent Locator) to scour the Internet (not just job boards) for resumes that match the customer’s exact requirements, including geographic location, which in this case, meant western Chicago.

Once Talent Locator finds them, we send the candidates a custom-designed email that matches the customer’s employment brand and promotes the specific career opportunity. The call-to-action sends the candidate directly to the customer’s web site, recruiter, or hiring manager to start the application process.

So, back to the fun-food company. For this particular project, Talent Locator found close to 1,150 QA Specialists who both lived in the area of western Chicago and were bilingual.

Of course, not all of those QA Specialists wanted a new job, so when they saw a subject line notifying them that our customer was hiring, not all of them bothered to open it. This is a good thing. The potential candidates have begun to screen themselves from the process.

Now, the subject line did intrigue about 25% of them, which means the number of QA Specialists at least nominally interested in a job with our customer still hovered in the range of 270 people. Now came the tough part. How many of these bilingual candidates wanted to work a third shift?

The answer: about 80 of them. And that’s exactly how many applicants our customer received. Earlier this week, our customer sent us an email, telling us they’ve scheduled interviews with four candidates, and that they have a few others they’re considering, if the interviews don’t work out.

So, in just about two weeks time, our customer received a significant number of qualified candidates for a bilingual, third-shift position in a food-production plant 50 miles outside of Chicago.

That’s what Reverse Posting does. It works.