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.
Advertising on general jobs boards. There are now a core group of very large jobs boards which cover all sectors. One such example is monster.co.uk, which is very appropriately named as these boards are huge. they have traffic levels and visitor levels which are monstrous and the number of applications going through the site are vast, sounds great so far! The draw back is in the lack of specificity. A job advertised on these boards is viewed by a wide and often non specific audience, generating an equally non specific and usually large response. On the one hand recruitment agencies can be sure to receive plenty of Cvs but may have to allocate a lot of time to sift through them all.
Headhunting. Often coined as 'search' this is the act of pro actively looking for people who fit the specification for a given role and approach them directly, often without them having expressed an interest in moving. There are many advantages here. Apart from the obvious one, that being that you approach people who already hit the specification, the other big advantage is in finding people not otherwise 'on the market' and registered with recruitment agencies. This hugely increases your chances of making a placement if you get something on the go. The down side here is the conflict of interest. Clients will (sometimes quite rightly) be concerned that you will simply come back one day to headhunt their placement to put them elsewhere. Consequently, headhunters generally avoid pulling anyone from their client companies.
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.
Sector specific jobs boards. There now 1000s of these in the UK. In theory any recruitment agency would rather advertise on something specific to their industry as would any candidate prefer to look on something specific to them. Perhaps the biggest issue for recruitment agencies to watch out for is that many are sites almost run as a hobby no a small scale with little internet presence and little impact.
Resourcing service agencies. These are companies who subscribe to large numbers of Cv databases, often base over seas, and they offer to carry out the first part of the recruitment process in generating a short list for you. Recruitment agencies provide a brief and in return expect a qualified short list. In theory great. In practise, problematic if the resource doesn't understand your sector it's seriously limited.
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.
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