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By Matthew Quinn
Underscoring how cautious companies were in hiring last year, internal transfers and promotions were on average the source of 51 percent of all the full-time positions companies filled in 2009, according to research released by staffing consultancy CareerXroads on Friday.
That's a significant increase over 2008 when 39 percent of full-time jobs were filled with internal candidates and 34 percent in 2007.
"The spike in internal movement is a strong artifact of the recession and suppressed many other sources of hire," the report said. "Expect internal movement to fall to more normal levels in 2010."
The results were based on responses from 41 companies with approximately 1.8 million employees and which filled over 175,000 positions last year.
Even when they looked at outside for candidates, companies tried to stick close to known quantities. Referrals were the biggest source of external hires, providing 26.7 percent of all such hires. CareerXroads data shows that percentage has remained relatively constant over the past five years.
The next most common source of external hires was career sites (22.3 percent), followed by job boards (13.2 percent) and direct sourcing (6.9 percent), such as mining databases for resumes.
The yield for referrals was one hire for every 15 referrals, making it the most efficient category by far.
Interestingly, 30 percent of respondents said they "do not know and cannot even guess" at the size of their contingent workforce, such as contract and part-time workers. Those that did know said such workers made up 13.6 percent of their workforce on average. That could become an issue if predictions that contingent workers could become 25 to 35 percent of a company's workforce in the next few years are correct.
The survey also found that Monster continues to lose ground to CareerBuilder among job boards. CareerBuilder was the source of 41.6 percent of hires made using a job board, while Monster only provided 11.6 percent. However, CareerXroads noted that one firm had a disproportionate number of hires from CareerBuilder that skewed the results and probably over-represented CareerBuilder by a third.
One of the sources staffing departments are trying to use more is social media, although only 500 hires could be attributed to social media last year.
In terms of hiring outlook, the respondents were largely optimistic. Just 10.8 percent of them predicted further reductions in hiring while 48 percent expect to grow and the remainder to hold steady. In all, they expect to fill 29 percent more jobs in 2010 than last year when they filled 27 percent fewer jobs than in 2008.
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