Talent Management Processes

Process Savings Through Careers Site Best Practices

by Taleo Research

The corporate Careers website is an increasingly central and significant place to manage the staffing processes for large companies. With Careers website best practices implemented, a corporation may achieve a competitive edge in recruiting the most qualified candidates quickly. Taleo Research has tracked the significant increases in adoption of corporate Careers websites and Careers site best practices by the Fortune 500 companies since 2000. A number of these practices create value for the corporation in the area of process savings by eliminating labor-intensive and non-value added steps in the staffing cycle.

The features and functionality of these best practices include:

  • Pre-screening Tools
  • Saved Candidate Profile
  • Company Culture Information
  • Employee Benefits Information
  • Privacy Policy
  • College Recruiting Section
  • Automatic Requisition Number Tracking
  • Online Response Only
  • Candidate Feedback

Here we’ll focus on three especially effective Careers website best practices that bring about process savings.

Pre-screening Tools

With online job-hunting, and the ease and convenience in applying for jobs it affords, it is now possible for a jobseeker to apply for hundreds of job positions in a single evening. Online recruiting can quickly swamp a recruiter with job applications and resumes. In the face of this increased volume, recruiters still must carry out the process of screening and assessing candidates, with the ultimate goal of making a hiring decision. Online pre-screening tools separate qualified from unqualified candidates on the basis of a self-administered test or questionnaire. Significant amounts of time can be saved on each job requisition, allowing the recruiter to focus his or her time and attention on the more promising candidates.

As detailed in the Taleo Research report, Value Creation Through Corporate Careers Websites,1 nearly ten percent of the Fortune 500 included pre-screening questionnaires as part of the online job application process in 2002, compared with less than five percent of the Fortune 500 that did so in 2001; resulting in a year-over-year growth rate of more than 100 percent.

Saved Candidate Profile

The Saved Candidate Profile best practice provides candidates with the ability to create and maintain a personal profile on the Careers website, which they can then access and “attach” to job positions in the future as the opportunities arise. A Careers website with saved candidate profiles makes the candidate, and not the resume, the fundamental unit of selection. This contributes to process savings by reducing wasted administrative time while creating more consistency in candidate records accessible across the enterprise.

The practice of allowing jobseekers to create and maintain a candidate profile on the Careers website increased significantly in 2002 to 31 percent of the Fortune 500, up from 17 percent in the previous year, for a year-over-year growth of 80 percent.

Online Response Only

In 2002, 42 percent of the Fortune 500 directed all candidates wishing to respond to job positions posted to the corporate Careers website through a purely online response mechanism. In 2001, 34 percent of the Fortune 500 did not give jobseekers the option of responding offline to job positions posted to the corporate Careers website.

The benefits to a corporation of the Online Response Only best practice derive from the efficiencies accrued from the digital formatting of candidate information. Corporations can gauge the real dollars saved by avoidance of costs associated with the processing (handling and scanning) of paper resumes. Savings equal the volume of paper the corporate Careers website ordinarily generates multiplied by the processing cost per resume.

Process Savings
The corporate Careers site is the public facing front-end recruiting portal for data flowing into the back-end corporate staffing management system. The corporate Careers website and the corporation’s staffing management methods and systems are inextricably linked, and at best, are fully integrated. Distinct Careers website features and functionality can have a considerable impact on reducing administrative overhead and process costs by, for instance, providing self-serve information to candidates, eliminating duplicate data entry, streamlining candidate short-list creation through automated pre-screening, supporting the efficiencies of a digital process, and affecting other steps in the staffing process. For corporate Careers websites, the impact of best practices goes beyond their immediate utility to create real value for organizations striving to meet staffing goals efficiently and effectively.

1Value Creation Through Corporate Careers Websites. iLogos Research, 2003. Available at www.taleo.com/