Online Recruiting: One Step Back…

• Author: Anna Kassulke
• Posted: August 13, 2007
• Category: Sourcing Strategies, Employment Branding
• Tags: No Tags
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Hopes, Dreams and Realities of Sourcing on the Internet: Part One
 
When the World Wide Web first became part of our lives, it appeared to be a godsend for HR and recruiters alike. It felt like the most time-effective place to advertise open positions, because it is relatively cheap and generates a fast response. Today, most of us continue to gamble on the assumption that within 10-15 seconds of posting a position online, a resume - or even resumes - will appear in our inbox. We believe we’ll beat the odds that the right candidates, out of the 4,000,000 people in the US who look for work online every day, will be drawn to us like magnets. But is it a good strategy to go the web with postings if you get inundated with responses from unqualified or uninterested people, or people hundreds of miles away?
 
Perhaps you post on your organization’s website. In 2001, an estimated 9 out of every 10 companies in the US had a career section on their website, 80% of those advertised open positions, and 70% accepted online applications and resumes. We would wager that many of them found that limited traffic actually made it to the site, and that of the people who did apply online through the site, many were unqualified.
 
Many organizations have also turned to job boards. Which one do you post on? According to our research, there is strong brand loyalty, with most people only using one site - among the most popular are Monster.com and Careerbuilder. But we need to remind ourselves when we make use of a job board: there is no single site that lists every job posting, nor one that lists every resume. There are thousands of niche sites that are specific to geographical location, skill sets, job titles, salary ranges, and ethnic groups. In 2003, it was estimated that 60% of all resumes on the net were posted on niche sites.

Internet postings have a number of disadvantages. They often attract clearly unqualified candidates. They attract the attention of your competition, due to the public or semipublic nature of the postings. They need to be refreshed daily to be seen - for a job posted at 9 AM Monday morning, by 11 it will have slipped to the 2nd page. And by Friday it will be hopelessly buried. Furthermore, they are rarely geographically specific.

When we run an ad, we hope that everybody who has the skill, background, and experience we want is going to see that ad. We also hope that it’ll grab their interest enough for them to respond. This is how we have been recruiting for 100 years. Not to deprecate lady luck, but this strategy is founded on hope alone won’t get you anywhere. It’s like expecting a single leaf to fall into your hand on a windy day.

Probably 70% of the U.S. workforce is in the market for work. That’s a rough estimate, based on the number of resumes on the web in upwards of 2,000 resume databases. So how do we make a decision as to where to post when there are no demographics on the web? Everyone is on the web, and the variables available to everyone are countless. So where do you put out your bait for the people you need among this slurry of sites and resume postings? Odds are that the way your organization uses the web for attracting the talent you need is inexact, yields poor results, and has no proven predictability. There are two main strategies that can be adopted for making the most out of the WWW for sourcing. The first is to use the Web as a source of considerable information about who is out there; the second is to get your organization’s careers website working for you with little effort.

In Part Two we’ll discuss sourcing and web site strategy, so stay posted!