Are you getting the most out of online recruiting services? Read on for tips on streamlining your cyber-search for new staffers.
It's been touted as the perfect place to buy and sell products and services, a low-cost advertising medium, and yes, even a platform for recruiting new employees. However, using this explosive new medium - known, of course, as the Internet - to lasso the right types of employees requires unique skills, even for the most experienced of recruiters.
But that shouldn't be a deterrent for your company. There are strategic ways to formulate ads, field responses to filter and match potential candidates appropriately to their new workstations or offices. And, for those human resource managers who don't want to take on the task by themselves, there are also myriad consultants on the Web that are ready and willing to help.
Why the Web Works
Just a few years ago, many people would have shunned the Web when it came to conducting their own job search and recruiting key staffers. But with the nation's unemployment rate approaching record lows, companies of all sizes and across all industries - especially those in the high-tech fields -- have been forced to find creative ways to lure new employees.
"It's a job seeker's market out there," is a cliché that has graced the pages of every magazine and newspaper across the nation at least once during the last few months, and companies are feeling the strain. With a booming economy in full force, it's no longer enough to simply place a four-line "Help Wanted" ad in the newspaper and sit back to wait for the stream of phone calls and resumes to pour in.
While experts agree that there's no one best way to search for talent in cyberspace, a successful strategy is highly dependent on a company's individual needs, as well as exactly what type of candidates are being sought, and - perhaps most importantly - how much the company wants to spend.
Perhaps best known are the commercial career sites, such as CareerMosaic and Monster.com, where businesses of all sorts can post industry-specific help-wanted listings. The biggest advantage of these sites is the traffic they attract: Some boast as many as 300,000 queries per day. With these services, the recruiter typically pays the fee for posting services. If you decide to go this route, expect to pay an average of $200 per 30- or 60-day posting.
Less known, but also effective, are sites that offer free job-posting boards for both employers and job seekers. Examples include the Web sites of alumni groups and industry-specific trade and professional associations, as well as topical sites such as StarChefs, which offers a culinary "Career Center."
Many of the Net's 250,000 "listserves" - electronic discussion groups that route e-mail to their members - provide similar free posting services. Generally nonprofit in nature and staffed by volunteers, listserves can be particularly useful. Through these e-mail services, employers can reach out to potential recruits who might not be job-hunting. Moreover, messages can be cut, pasted, and forwarded to others who might be. A word of caution, though: Recruiters must follow a list's "Netiquette," and some lists don't allow job notices. Others include guidelines for such postings in their rules, but when in doubt, ask the list moderator.
Another option for job postings can be found in the thousands of loosely organized Internet newsgroups - which cover just about every topic and industry imaginable.
According to Edward Melia, managing director of Internet recruiting and training for SHL CyberQuest in Boston, there are scores of different services and software solutions available at different price points that claim to assist in facilitating online recruiting. However, he cautions companies to "select vendors with care. Inexperienced and unskilled vendors abound in the online recruiting world."
HireWorks, is one suite of products designed specifically to allow recruiters to broadcast their job opportunities to several Internet job posting sites with the click of the mouse and, through use of an intelligent spider, searches for appropriate resumes from various Internet sites. Once it finds resumes that appear to match the job qualifications, it brings them back to the recruiter and, at the same time, contacts the candidate via e-mail and tells them they may be a good match. This message contains a hyperlink to the employer's Web page containing the detail for the job and several options on how to apply for the position. "In addition, there is a nifty workflow manager that, through e-mail, keeps the process between recruiter, candidate and hiring manager moving right along," says Melia. "This is very important in this job market, where he who snoozes loses the candidate to the competition."
For selection, SHL's ApView Net technology allows employers to evaluate and assess potential hires based on psychometrically sound criteria - all done with astounding accuracy and intelligence and with very little human intervention. "This technology is advancing very quickly and will be the foundation for how companies will select employees in the new millennium," Melia states.
A Hybrid Approach
The Internet can be a great place to find new employees, but as with traditional recruiting, it takes a combination of methods to be successful. For this reason, businesses looking to staff up should use online job boards, newsgroups and their own company Web sites to find the best people. Recognizing that the Internet's value goes beyond that of a fancy display device, innovative recruiting professionals are using next-generation Web site features to enlarge their pool of prospective employees - as well as to promote their companies.
"These HR specialists have discovered that harnessing the Web's inherent interactivity allows them to create highly personalized and responsive Web recruiting domains that deliver results for both the applicant and the company," says Melia.
And while dozens of interactive tools are popping up on the Web, at least four - Web site search engines, interactive job application forms, e-mail autoresponders and e-mail mailing lists - are appearing more frequently and gaining considerable popularity on human resources Web sites. These tools allow companies to link their databases with the Web site and enable applicants to interact with a company more efficiently.
Autoresponders and mailing lists rank among the Internet's oldest forms of communication, and are still widely available for tasks like recruiting. These and other interactive Web tools have one common result: Instead of simply "stopping by" or "saying hello," the applicant and the HR department can actually begin doing business over the Web. Some of the more established products to consider in this category include:
Ads That Net the Right Candidates
On the Internet, the very way an ad is worded or designed can mean the difference between netting the great versus the less than desirable candidate. Postings should include as much detail as possible in order to bring in candidates who match your specific criteria and office environment.
The following advertisement for a Sales Manager is an example of a well-written, targeted posting:
Dynamic small sales office seeks sales professional with 3+ years experience in sales management and a proven track record in hiring and training. Multiple-office management, staffing industry and IT experience is strongly desired. Local market knowledge is a plus.
We offer a very competitive compensation plan including base salary, quarterly bonuses, equity in the form of stock options, comprehensive health/medical benefits, 401k program and a tremendous entrepreneurial atmosphere of upward mobility.
Interested candidates should forward a resume as a Word or text document attachment to HR@companyX.com. For additional details, visit our Web site at www.companyX.com.
From a design standpoint, Melia says simple, eye-catching ads work best. Flashy, overproduced and over-designed ads can be annoying, busy, and often do not work, he says. "Keep it simple, to the point, and make it attractive and enticing," Melia advises. "Many companies are bent on getting the ad in as many places as possible. This 'shotgun' approach is not necessarily the best strategy. Instead, use the much more effective 'laser' approach, and the key word to remember is 'focus.'"
Furthermore, he says, ads posted on sites that offer the user some incitement usually prove most successful (i.e. free giveaways or useful, substantive information).
"Ads that are strategically placed to attract a target audience will get the results," Melia states. "One strategy that works well is to survey employees in a specific department [of your company] to get an idea about the places those employees visit on the Web." For example, Melia's company recently found that one client's IT employees regularly visited sports sites to check the scores and stock market sites to check prices and portfolios. "Placing ads on these sites paid off with a significant number of candidates 'clicking through' to the recruiting home page," he says.
Effective Placement
There are literally thousands of options at a company's fingertips when it comes to placing their well-thought-out employment ads on the Web. Melia says that making extensive use of the smaller, focused "micro" Web sites, such as www.SoftwareEngineer.com and www.MISManager.com, is one strategy that works well.
"Job seekers love these sites because they're full of positions just for them ... no sorting through irrelevant noise," he adds. "Employers love them for that very same reason -- and most are free."
George Johnson, vice president of marketing for techies.com, an Edina, Minn.-based technology career portal that caters to specific geographic regions, says that developing a corporate recruiting home page with specific areas addressing "what it's like to work at your company," is a good way to familiarize job candidates with the firm before they even see your ad.
"In our business, we create fixed-page recruiting brochures for companies that include company information, testimonials from workers, a tour of the company, and information about what it's like to work in the specific department or area," says Johnson. "With this strategy, companies are able to pre-qualify potential candidates so that even before viewing a job posting, they know everything there is to know about a particular firm."
Overall, Johnson recommends that firms that are looking for local candidates use a job site that's devoted to the firm's local area. And, he says, those companies who want to enlist a firm like his to help with the process should find one that will do myriad different advertising for candidates, and that will do more than simply place an ad on a Web site. "Look for a company that has an agent that matches candidates to jobs - otherwise, you'll have to go through a listing and take forever to find the right candidate," he says. "And, last but not least, seek out sites that cover a niche -- for example, a sales-related site for sales professionals, a technology-related site for IT professionals, etc."
Offer Them More Than Money
Companies that assume that job seekers' only thoughts are "Show me the money" should seriously reassess their recruiting strategies before creating their online ads. Recruiting experts agree that most workers are more concerned about their work environment and duty list than about their paychecks. And many candidates - especially recent college graduates - place priorities on autonomy, unique office space, flexible work hours, telecommuting options, and so on.
"New grads entering the job market have lots of options, but they're making decisions based on many factors, not just money," says Steve Pollock, COO of WetFeet.com. "They want an assignment that will challenge them and set up their career path. For employers, defining a great position - not salary - is the key to hiring the brightest young people."
In a survey of Class of '99 seniors and MBA candidates from more than 50 schools across the country, 98 percent rated "working on a challenging and interesting assignment" as "highly important." More than 90 percent gave "good training for future work" and "great co-workers" the same ranking. Only 84 percent said salary was at the top of the factors in their consideration.
If your company offers any of these enticing perks listed above, be sure to play them up in your recruiting efforts.
A Few Red Flags
Even companies that use the Internet heavily for recruiting agree that it's a method that comes with its share of drawbacks. For starters, there's no way to effectively and aggressively interview a person over the Internet. Additionally, companies afraid of disclosing sensitive information to their competitors must be careful to avoid posting revealing job descriptions.
And, with online recruiting, there's always the possibility (and, depending on how attractive the job offer is, the probability) of an unmanageable flood of incoming resumes via fax and e-mail. However, Melia says there is a solution to this problem. He advises starting by setting up dedicated e-mail addresses and incoming mailboxes to handle the extra load. "Currently, though, new screening and selection software is available to automate the process. Advances in screening and selection technologies are rapid, and the results are quite astounding and many companies are now using these intelligent applications to automate much of the pre-screening and candidate-selection process."
E-Cruiter and Resumix are examples of resume-screening technologies that can assist you with weeding out mismatched or unqualified applicants.
To cut down on the e-mail "clutter," Johnson suggests having candidates fill out very detailed profiles of their skills, then preparing a profile of the type of candidate you're looking for. Then, by marrying the two profiles together, your company can identify candidates that will make a good match. "This cuts out 90 percent of possible candidates that a company would receive without the profiles," he says. "It's a great way to narrow down the process of getting to the right candidate."
Where to Start
Several great resources exist on the Web for HR professionals interested in learning more about Internet recruiting. Melia cites the Society of Human Resource Management as being "a wonderful springboard that should be a bookmark in every HR professional's browser." In addition, Internet Business Network recently ranked the top 10 online recruiting enterprises:
Resistant to Change?
Despite the attention focused on the Internet as a recruitment tool, help-wanted classified advertising is still projected to be the most widely used and effective venue through which companies will recruit and hire candidates in 1999, according to a national survey by the William Olsten Center for Workforce Strategies. The companies reported that more than 43 percent of new hires will be recruited by classified advertising, while only 5 percent are expected to be generated via the Internet and job-recruitment Web sites this year.
Still, there is no question that both employers and job seekers are increasing their use of the Internet, and that Web-based resources are providing more recruiting information and assistance. The real question, however, is whether the Internet is becoming a better source of candidates as it gets bigger. A special report from Best Software Inc. revealed that "while online recruiting is fast becoming an essential tool for HR professionals, its potential remains largely untapped. The Internet recruiting industry, estimated at $48 million in 1997, will grow almost tenfold by 2002," thus signaling a major change in the way companies recruit employees.
For additional assistance with online recruiting, see the following sites:
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