We are grateful to all survey participants for openly sharing their data, our sponsors ‐  JobAdder, JobGenie, NT3, Page Up People, PeoplePulse and our partner Recruiter Daily ‐ and contributors Dr. Ian Williamson and Gerry Crispin, for making the study possible.

In all 409 organisations of varying sizes, industry backgrounds and regional locations completed the survey. A total of 92,136 hires were recorded using seventeen identifiable sources of talent for the period July 2008 through to June 2009.

The key findings of the report include:

1. Source of talent varies across Australia with almost twenty identifiable source of talent.
2. Job boards, in their various iterations, take a leadership role being the predominant source of talent in Australia with 29.64% of hires attributed to them.
3. Perceptions of the most effective sources of talent by recruiters differ from the reality of where talent is sourced.
4. Different industries use significantly different sources to find talent within Australia.
5. The different regions of Australia also seem to source talent differently, for example in the ACT 49.70% of talent is found through internal recruiters.
6. Referrals as sources are not as developed as expected being only the fourth most successful source at 7.57% of hires.
7. Print media while having a reputation of an archaic channel still exists as the seventh most successful source of hires.
8. Employers and agency recruiters differ in how they source talent with agency recruiters relying heavily on job boards.
9. Social media is in its infancy ranking last as a source talent in Australia, with usage higher in smaller organisations.
10. Data collection is poor with over 7% of organizations have no reliable method of tracking their source of talent.

There is a lot more in the report so go download it and have a read, we hope that the report stimulates further discussions within the HR and Recruitment industries.