Sourcing Disappears as Applications Pile Up for Overwhelmed Recruiters

I recently read an article regarding the challenges a recruiter faces when hundreds of applicants apply for a single position, as is the norm in today's market. The article mainly highlights issues related to discrimination. In an effort to limit the number of applicants that apply for a position companies are attempting to limit the number of people who view an open position. For many companies this means searching only within a known network such as employee referrals or posting position only to a small local network. The results have been a huge loss of ethnic and racial diversity amongst application pools.

What concerns me here is that companies may more and more rely on focused internet sites to fill positions. It is understandable the a company would look to recruit this way. As is pointed out in the article, much of the time the company has laid off their recruiters, leaving the hiring manager to take care of recruiting themselves. Because they do not have the time to lead an exhausting search they will go the quickest route. A lot of the time this means posting on one or two internet sites and relying on the responses in the first day to be the applicant pool.

I wonder if recruitment software such as Avature have tools to help recruiters reach out to minority applicant pools. I could see how, potentially, a hiring manager using Avature's software could significantly limit the diversity of their search. With how easy it is to gather qualified applicants I wonder if recruiters will really be doing all that is necessary to ensure the applicant pool is diverse.