Vendor Selection & Technology

Internet recruiting has been described as a revolution since its inception in the mid 1990’s. Conference speakers, industry analysts, and high-profile executives repeatedly marveled at and focused on it as a new media with which to conduct the traditional recruiting process. Historically speaking (in “Internet years”), e-Recruiting was associated with online advertising. Early on, using advertising services such as Monster.com or Career Journal from The Wall Street Journal was considered to be e-Recruiting. And certainly, the online classifieds model has taken hold; it even has become a consumer brand standard. The New York Times incorporated its print and online recruitment services into an integrated offering called The New York Times Job Market. The TMP Worldwide/Yahoo/HotJobs deal was front page business section news. Job board ads are now a regular fixture of the Super Bowl.

 

Quietly, however, e-Recruiting has gone mainstream, but not primarily because of online classifieds. Today, the “Internet-ization” of the recruiting process has made it become a more systematic and complete process. As a consequence, the advertising part of the process is only a small element of the overall endeavor.

 

Online recruiting has become a widely adopted corporate practice. New tools, new methods and new opportunities have increased the speed and efficiency of recruiting, in ways that would not have been possible before. Corporations are using e-Recruiting to cut costs, streamline the hiring process, and improve relationships with candidates.

 

E-Recruiting makes the recruiting process happen in a digital fashion. The operations of the entire recruiting process are now possible online. That is what we call the Recruiting Supply Chain. Moreover, most of the individual steps can be accomplished online. For instance, we can now source people online, not only by using job boards but by using spiders (AIRS provide such services with its Search Station), and also have reference check services submitted online.

 
Source: Taleo Research, 2002

 

Global corporations are becoming increasingly aware that over 450 million people worldwide are now using the Internet. These large corporations are realigning recruitment strategy to best take advantage of the new opportunities the Internet represents. In an ongoing study of the Web sites of the Global 500 group of companies (the 500 largest corporations in the world, by revenue) Taleo Research has found a steady increase in the practice of recruiting through the company’s primary Internet presence, the corporate Web site. Corporate Web site recruiting by the Global 500 has grown from just 29 percent in 1998, to 60 percent in 1999, and to 79 percent in 2000. In 2001, jobseekers could learn about job opportunities on the Web site of 88 percent of the Global 500. The four-year trend in the data confirms that Global 500 companies consider the corporate Web site to be a vital component of the organization’s overall recruiting effort.

 

Online recruiting is not just a “webification” of an older, paper-based process. E-Recruiting enables new practices and processes not available before. Not only is it faster and cheaper, e-Recruiting is different in whole new ways. The instant communication made possible by e-mail increases the speed of recruiting, while the Web gives recruiters a much broader reach. Permission-based and viral online marketing, in the form of Job Agents for example, add new layers of interactivity not possible with traditional recruiting. The Internet combines mass broadcasting with the ability to customize the message narrowly to communicate one-on-one with the jobseeker. And most significantly, e-Recruiting automates fundamental recruiting tasks such as matching and screening, making them scalable across an enterprise.

 

E-Recruiting gave the early adopters a competitive advantage, particularly with respect to sourcing, but that competitive edge is now gone. The competitive advantages of e-Recruiting are now to be found in increasing the efficiency of recruiting, achieved through streamlining and integrating processes. E-Recruiting provides corporate recruiters with faster, better, and in some cases completely novel recruiting tools. The challenge now is to determine the best practices for using the tools to maximize results. Technology alone will not give companies a competitive advantage, but flawless execution will. The goal of e-Recruiting is still the same – hire better people, faster, and cheaper than before – but the methods and tools have changed.