Apologies for the slight delay in responding. I helped put the research together in the UK and my colleagues at Randstad in the US have alerted me to your queries.The research centred around a job in the market – whether that was advertised on the Internet or by other means. We didn’t specifically look at the issue of reposting but instead looked at the total time it was live – eg: we discounted whether it was refreshed or not. Anecdotally we do know that some job specs are clearly harder to fill because of the niche candidate required or because sometimes the client has not been in the recruitment market recently enough to know that their wishlist is going to be very difficult to achieve. That’s where we always try to offer our guidance -as if the spec is too niche to begin with it won’t aid the client to try and pursue it without offering our insight at the beginning. We do have some stats on how long the average job is open for. While it took 40 days to fill a post in Q2 2011, this rose to 59 days in Q2 2012 – however I should caveat they are very specfic to our accountancy and banking recruitment statistics in London.

I hope that helps shed some more light on the questions and apologies again time difference meant I wasn’t able to respond before.

Cheers,

Keith

I don’t mind exhausting a posting if there is a defined plan and we get the best fit for the job in the end. However, where the recruitment plan has gone stale or awry- I think it is best to unpost after 60-70 days and reevaluate the path forward for the reasons stated in your article.

I will be sharing this information with my team.

Thanks again,

Janine

Did you look at the possibility that companies taking too long to find candidates put together a job spec that was not possible to get filled? For example, is a C level company looking for A level candidates?

What we are experiencing at Ongig is that companies are primarily advertising “roles” that they hire consistently for. Thus, the position always seems to be open from the candidate’s perspective. Perhaps a company just needs to be more clear when advertising those types of positions.

As for length of opening, we are seeing an average that is around 70 days. Much of that is on the employer as they take many weeks to conduct interviews and make decisions. It’s likely true that many top candidates arrive early in the process.

Cheers,

Keith