|
|||
|
|
|
||||||
|
Great Expectations
The Internet has become a valuable recruiting tool during the last 10 years. However, many say it still has far to go to reach its potential for finding and attracting passive candidates.
In the past decade, millions of resumes and job postings have been pushed, pulled and otherwise processed through the Internet. Along the way, job-seekers used the Web to land gainful employment (or not) and corporate recruiters and talent-hunters from companies of all sizes hoped their new labor-saving technology and its appended applications (i.e., resume/applicant tracking) proved a competitive advantage. At the same time, newspapers saw the Internet gradually melt away their classified-advertising dollars, as the action moved to the Monsters, Yahoo! Hot Jobs and the thousands of other online job sites of the world. Yet, with all the hype, glitz, promises and related software the Internet has wrought, some experts say (though recruiting executives don't necessarily agree) that online recruiting has still not fulfilled the promise of delivering the ever-elusive "passive" job-seeker, the recruiter's Holy Grail. That isn't to say it will never happen, say the experts. But even with all the reasons that online recruiting has greatly helped employers in the war for talent, it just hasn't happened yet. "I've been involved through all of it, and the online recruiting revolution hasn't occurred yet," says John Sullivan, professor of management at San Francisco State University and one of e-recruiting's most well-known and outspoken gurus. "Even with all the technology, it's pretty much the same as before. The ads even look the same. To me, the new way of online recruiting still hasn't happened, and by that I mean the Web as a way to find the people who are not looking to change employers." David Carpe, principal at Clew Inc., a Lexington, Mass.-based HR consulting firm, agrees that, while the Web has dramatically increased the quantity of resumes employers receive and tools for managing the correlating inflow of data have become more widely available, employers still aren't getting the quality job candidate many of them seek via the Web. "You've heard the expression, 'You can put lipstick on a pig, but you still have a pig,' " he says. "Well, that's what happened in the online recruiting process. It's not enough to just digitize and process resumes." Brand Central Stations
To get to the next level, say Sullivan and Carpe, employers need to use the Internet to find passive candidates much like the successful marketing department finds customers. "As far as recruiting goes, I'm frustrated with the Internet," says Sullivan. "It's mainly newspaper classified ads stuck on the computer screen. We need a system that customizes the information, that reaches the passive candidate where they go on the Web. We need to use more micro-marketing, more pizzazz." Sullivan says a company could have the greatest brand on the planet, with the marketing people sitting across the hall, and most recruiting departments wouldn't even know it. "There's a disconnect," he says. "People in recruiting have never taken a marketing or sales class. To get the truly passive job candidates into the pipeline, you have to make a very compelling argument. I'm a fan of the Internet as far as recruiting goes, but it certainly hasn't reached its potential. If you look at most career centers on company Web sites, they wouldn't make you want to leave your current job." Ron Selewach, CEO and founder of the Human Resource Management Center in Tampa, Fla., says that while the days of "moving resumes around the building in wheelbarrows" have disappeared with Web-generated recruiting data, a major problem remains: Candidates still move through the process with too many touch points, causing too many fits and starts. That kind of process is not appealing to passive job-seekers, even if they are interested in a company. "Some job boards claim their sites are loaded with 'passive job-seeker resumes,' but in my view, if a person takes the time to write up a resume and submit it to a job board, that's an active candidate," says Selewach. "A passive candidate has no up-to-date resume. Passive candidates are on the Internet, but they're doing other things." Selewach says the challenge for today's online recruiters lies in fashioning a compelling message that will appeal to passive candidates. And that requires putting the lures in places where the passive candidates will find them. For example, he says, if you're looking for a marine mechanic, you place your job posting as an ad on the American Power Boat site or some other site that potential candidates would frequent, even if they aren't actively looking. The experts also agree on another point: Online recruiting is ubiquitous and here to stay. In fact, a study commissioned by the DirectEmployers Association, an Indianapolis-based, nonprofit consortium of more than 200 U.S. employers, including Colgate Palmolive, General Electric and Progressive Insurance (and owner of its own job-search engine, JobCentral.com), found that Internet sources produced 51 percent of all hires in 2005. Interestingly, the study, conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton, revealed that the largest source of hires were the employers' own corporate Web sites, while newspaper classified advertisements were the source of only 5 percent of the new hires.
Showcasing the Experience At Thomson Corp., the $8.5 billion Stamford, Conn., educational publishing company, top recruiting executives say the Internet has definitely made life easier when it comes to sourcing potential employees for entry-level and campus-recruiting-level jobs, but hasn't been quite as effective for middle-management and executive positions. Thomson, a member of the DirectEmployers consortium, is in the process of redesigning its "Career Center" Web site to make it more attractive and user-friendly for job candidates. "The main thing is, if people are to be attracted to Thomson, they have to be able to learn about us in-depth on our Career Center," says Kathleen McCarthy, vice president of recruiting and workforce planning at Thomson, which has 40,500 employees worldwide. "As a business, we try to offer a career site that gives the individual the information he or she needs to make a good decision. We designed Career Center to showcase what it's really like to work at this organization." In keeping with the theory that marketing needs to play a crucial role in attracting quality talent, Thomson is refocusing its Career Center site to showcase the employee experience -- to show potential candidates how people can grow and move across different divisions within the organization. To do it, they are providing online "success stories" featuring employees who have crossed over into different divisions and careers within Thomson. "We're offering real success stories online. Before, we weren't getting that message across," says Sue Quackenbush, Thomson's director of recruiting and workforce planning, adding that the Internet generates about 400,000 resumes annually for Thomson, while the Career Center itself has about 1.6 million unique visits in the same time frame. "We have to show how it's not just about accepting a job; it's about the many different career experiences you can have at Thomson." A Dramatic Shift
Stephen Schwander, director of recruitment and global projects at New York-based Reuters America, began his career as a classic headhunter in 1997, working for an employment agency. He remembers buying company directories hot off the presses and cold calling to root out the passive candidates. "We made 100 calls a day," he says with a laugh. "But the benefit was, we were going after the quintessential passive candidate -- although sometimes we didn't know if we were calling the janitor or the head of trading at Merrill Lynch." Schwander says things started to change as the large job boards came into their own during the late '90s. But today, he says, there is a huge difference between then and now, as the online recruiting process has matured. "You can be a lot smarter now with the data that comes in, in terms of screening tools, etc.," Schwander says. "But the key still is, and will always be, human interaction. Online recruiting tools are only as good as the people who develop them." Although the Web has improved the recruiting process, he says, much remains to be done. "Five years ago, the only capability we had was publishing job descriptions on the Web and getting responses by e-mail," he says, adding that Reuters uses Waltham, Mass.-based Authoria as its e-recruiting vendor. "Then, we got smarter and began to streamline the data flow of candidates by using more sophisticated applicant-tracking systems." Now, he says, the tables have turned, to some extent, as employers are being challenged by candidates who don't want to go through multiple screens to submit their resumes to Reuters. Candidates also are using search applications and other online tools (not to mention those Web sites containing negative information about specific companies that pop up on a regular basis) to research a company before they apply for work. "We still need to simplify the online process for job-seekers," says Schwander, noting that of all of Reuters' job openings, 50 percent are filled internally and 25 percent or so by referrals. "We haven't always had enough information to do proactive recruiting online. It's a real challenge getting more data and, at the same time, making the application process easier for online job candidates." Schwander says the Web's biggest promise is that somehow it can be a better mousetrap for passive candidates, one that really grabs their attention. So far, he says, such solutions are scarce. Todd Leeson, senior director of marketing at Jobster, the Seattle-based company that uses a social-networking model to help companies connect with jobseekers, says the predominant online recruiting methods today remain job boards, which by their nature are not where the passive candidate can be found. "The elusive superstars aren't going to job boards on a regular basis," he says. "So at Jobster, we are putting the jobs where those elusive superstars go, using viral e-mail, blogs, user-group forums and other online strategies." Leeson adds that Jobster emulates the highly successful employee referral programs, but uses the Web and other online methods to do it. "We are trying to deliver passive candidates in a more relevant and social fashion," he says. "We take the same method of internal referral programs and leverage the Internet and social networks. We try to cast a wide net, so to speak." The "Big Brown Box"
Steve Pogorzelski, group president of Monster International in New York, says online recruiting has a new category, one he calls the "poised" candidate. "The Web has created a new type of job candidate," he says. "This new middle group may not seem to be actively looking, but they are poised for change. They are opportunistic, and always looking to improve their situations and manage their careers. Talented people today, in fact, are more committed to a career and less to an organization. There has been a shift. Online recruiting provides greater channels of distribution, and has made the talent equation much more bi-directional and balanced." At talent-management vendor Taleo, based in San Francisco, the feeling is that while attracting passive candidates is certainly desirable, it's just one aspect of online-recruiting success. "Passive candidates are, by their nature, elusive, but recruiting technology is helping to reach these candidates," says David Michaud, vice president for product marketing. "We recommend, however, that companies focus not only on passive candidates, but rather have a well-rounded, integrated sourcing campaign that promotes their company as an employer of choice that will attract all types of job-seekers at any given time." He adds that having the right tools in place to tie together an integrated sourcing campaign and respond quickly to all candidates is the key to landing talent. Taleo has built partnerships with networking sites such as Jobster, LinkedIn and AIRS to reach both active and passive candidates. It also offers job-agent functionality that informs candidates when new job opportunities become available that match their online profiles, encouraging all job-seekers to take action. Taleo also provides tools that promote an ongoing dialogue with passive or active candidates and real-time alerts that immediately notify recruiters when candidates who meet certain criteria apply for positions. Similar to the strategy used by Jobster, Reuters' Schwander says the way to reach the true passive candidates is to connect with them where they hang out on the Web. For example, if someone visits Yahoo to check out financials, that same person is probably interested in the stock market. They should see live jobs there, and should also see that the financial data came from Reuters (with a link to the Reuters career site). As it stands, Reuters' online recruiting efforts have paid off, Schwander says. The company went from filling 35 percent of its external openings via agencies in 2001 to 8 percent in 2005, reducing its cost-per-hire numbers in the process. Plus, desktop recruiting tools have reduced paperwork and boosted productivity. "It's taken the clutter off the desk, and helped tremendously in collaborative hiring, whereby we can support one another in remote locations," he says. "It's also moving the passive-candidate data from the 'big brown box' behind the desk to well over 220,000 profiles in our database. Those are great things about online recruiting." Still, even with its successes, Reuters recently launched a redesign for its career site to encourage more "passive" traffic. Its strategies include using the Reuters.com news site to build RSS feeds (RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites) for media, financial services and technology, the company's three main hiring areas, and then offering links to its career site via those RSS feeds. "The hope is that Reuters.com can draw traffic and deliver passive candidates to our career site," he says. Amy Giglio, manager of recruiting at Columbus, Ga.-based insurer Aflac, says the company wasn't using job boards as recently as three years ago, mainly because its strong brand and community presence kept the talent pipeline flowing with quality candidates. "We didn't have a need because we had the applicant flow," says Giglio, who remembers a "paper only" recruiting experience when she came to the company eight years ago. The company's employee referral program, which requires little or no technology, remains its primary recruiting method. But Aflac has eliminated paper in its job application process, as every new job candidate must fill out an online form for recruiters to access in a job candidate database. And even late-to-the-game Aflac, which employs 4,200 people in a city of 200,000, has turned to online recruiting through Rightfish, a recruiting-services subsidiary of the Gannett Co. and the Tribune Co. "We see online recruiting more and more as a resource for us," Giglio says. Aflac, which receives 20,000 resumes annually through a variety of sources (it hired 863 people in 2005), also is adding a new applicant tracking system from Jacksonville, Fla.-based Vurv (formerly Recruitmax), one that Giglio says will help recruiters focus more on the interviewing/screening "high touch" aspects of their jobs. From Aflac's perspective, the Web has streamlined certain parts of the recruiting process, but she offers this caveat: "When you have all that technology, it really multiplies the number of candidates, so there are other issues in terms of managing all that data," she says. "But on balance, online recruiting is a good thing for Aflac."
August 1, 2006 Copyright 2006© LRP Publications |
||||||
Print
Email
Write to the Editor
Reprints
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
© Copyright 2010 LRP Publications. All rights reserved.
|
||||