Talent Management Processes

Bridging the Gap Between Offline Sourcing and Online Processing

by Taleo Research

Reducing the amount of paper is crucial to increasing the efficiency of a company’s recruiting process. Recruiting through a corporate Careers Web site is one way to eliminate paper. However, many companies are still feeling the need to source through traditional media, particularly for some positions. Sourcing in print can often result in high paper volumes. How might candidates who are sourced offline be directed quickly and efficiently into the company’s digital candidate pool? This article discusses one technique that can bridge the gap between offline sourcing and online processing.

The Corporate Careers Web Site

Most corporations are recruiting through the company’s primary Internet presence, the corporate Web site. In Trends in Fortune 500 Careers Web Site Recruiting, Taleo Research reports that 89 percent of the Fortune 500 recruit through the company’s corporate Careers Web site. The corporate Web site is a natural place to recruit for two reasons.

  • It is a source of candidates, either active or passive, who are knowledgeable about the company and who have sought the company out.
  • The corporate Web site can also act as a front-end user-interface to a back-end recruitment automation system.

A Web front-end is able to pull the right data from all candidates, and to give the data the structure necessary to make back-end processing more efficient. It is no wonder so many companies make a corporate Careers Web site the focal point of the company’s recruitment strategy. Taleo Research found that 34 percent of the Fortune 500 companies do not give visitors to the Careers Web sites the option of applying offline to a job position listed on the site; the option of mailing or faxing a resume is made unavailable. These corporations are taking steps to ensure that once a candidate arrives at the corporate Careers Web site, he or she does not take a step back into the realm of paper.

Paper to Bytes

In a poll by Taleo Research of over one hundred companies with more than 500 employees, 21 percent reported receiving between half and three-quarters of their job applications through the Internet; 12 percent reported receiving more than three-quarters of applications online. However, a company filling half of its positions online still is sourcing through traditional channels for the other half.

A recruiting process that has to deal with a 50:50 ratio of digital and paper resumes is probably in the worst possible position, experiencing all the headaches of paper, with few of the benefits of going digital. Supporting two parallel processes is not an option, so a company in this situation has to bear the costs of getting data from all sources into one common format and into one common system. How does a company with moderate success at digital recruiting but still sourcing in print improve its paper to bytes ratio?

Driving Traffic from Offline Recruitment Advertising

The general public is quite accustomed to hearing or reading a Web address (also known as a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator) in an advertisement, remembering it, and typing it into a Web browser when they next surf the Net (for example, www.microsoft.com/Office). Marketers have had success in driving traffic to specific areas of content on a corporate Web site and eliciting a desired action. Recruiting on the corporate Web site can benefit from the same techniques.

Recruiters should assign to the Careers Web site a URL that is simple, easy to remember, and that makes a clear connection between the company’s brand-identity and an employment theme. There are several ways of accomplishing this.

  • The first approach is to place the files for the Careers pages in a directory with a simple name. Approximately one in ten Fortune 500 companies choose a URL for the Careers Web site that ends in “/careers”, making it the most popular choice.
  • The second approach is to create a stand-alone Web domain for the careers content, like www.getacooljob.com.
  • The final approach is to assign the Careers Web site homepage a sub-domain under the company’s primary domain name; “http://jobs.abcinc.com” is one such example.

An easily remembered URL for the company Careers Web site enables traditional marketing to drive traffic to the Careers Web site. The URL should be promoted in all print material, including business cards, posters, brochures, and especially employment classified ads. The point is to drive traffic to the Careers Web site, to encourage as many applicants as possible to apply over the Web, as part of an aggressive plan to stamp out paper from the recruiting process.

The natural extension of this strategy is to make an online response the only means for applying to a position appearing in print. This would involve running print ads that do not provide a mailing address, fax number or even an email address; interested candidates would be invited instead to visit the Careers Web site and apply online. Referring jobseekers to the URL in all employment classified advertisements will better integrate print media and other offline sourcing with the more efficient, paperless recruiting processes companies have built up around the corporate Careers Web site.

Online Processing

Using an easily remembered URL for a Careers Web site helps bridges the gap between offline sourcing and online processing. Streamlined online front-end processing provides a low cost, highly efficient digital data stream that can flow through to an integrated, back-end system. To remain competitive, c ompanies require a complete staffing strategy. Tying together offline and online recruiting into a total communications and processing package is a significant component of a leading corporate recruiting practice.