EAA Regulations, Employment Agencies and Job Boards.

There are obvious problems for computer based job boards and on-line recruiters of all sorts in complying with the current EAA Regulations for employment agencies. Safeguards for the interests of work seekers, hirers and agencies, as well as a requirement to conform to general legislation, are necessary for the healthy running of the recruitment industry and are partly (if confusingly) covered by the Regulations. The role of an employment agency is not just that of facilitator for communications between hirer and work seeker. It also includes the carrying out of checks during the recruitment process which prevent some of the abuses and scams which have brought the industry into disrepute in recent years. However computer based recruitment systems cannot comply with those regulations which require human intervention, such as checking the details of hirers, jobs and work seekers, nor can they build the sort of relationships which enable a good recruiter to introduce hirers and work seekers to each other, who will work well together in the future.

On-line recruiters can handle many of the administrative functions of an employment agency but they cannot fulfil the complete role. Hirers who use an on-line recruitment system bypass the controls as well as the services provided by an agency and have to accept the whole responsibility of ensuring that they select the right person for the job and make all the necessary checks on their identity, qualifications, experience, etc. Using a human agency means that the responsibility as well as the recruitment workload are shared.

If on-line recruitment systems are freed from any form of regulation then the possibility exists for new abuses to occur, as technology advances, without any control being possible. They need to be subject to regulations suited to their modes of operation, not exempted altogether merely because the present ones do not fit them.

For instance, I suspect that very few, if any, on-line recruiters with searchable databases check with candidates, to see if they want to work with a hirer who is interested in their details for a particular vacancy. It would not be too difficult to set up their systems to do that but they do not do so, because they do not recognise that they should. In the same way there are many questions which could be asked when a work seeker is registered or when a hirer places an advertisement, which would bring on-line recruiters closer to the standards demanded of human agencies. The questions are not asked, because on-line recruiters regard themselves as passive facilitators of communication, rather than contributing actively to the recruitment process. They do not currently recognise full responsibility for the checks needed to safeguard the interests of the parties involved.

Meanwhile technical developments mean that more powerful on-line systems will come into use to support automated recruitment functions. One reason why the regulations have been found not to fit the on-line sector is that considerable technical advances have been made during the five years since the first consultation paper in May 1999. An example is the distribution of work seekers details automatically to subscribing hirers and agencies, using their chosen selection criteria, a process which can be criticised because it removes work seekersí control over who receives their details. This process can also affect the operations of employment agencies formally commissioned by a hirer to select candidates for a vacancy. They can find that a candidate carefully chosen from many applicants responding to advertisements has already been sent on a speculative basis to the same hirer, at a time when no vacancy existed. Candidate databases are not always secure and CVs are sometimes poached from one database to another, so that there is little real control over where personal data has gone. At present neither the EAA Regulations nor the Data Protection Act do much, if anything, to control these processes and protect the work seeker from abuse.

If there is good reason to regulate human based employment agencies there are at least as good reasons to regulate on-line ones. If it is difficult to distinguish for this purpose between on-line recruiters and vacancy pages in on-line newspapers, then the newspapers should also be regulated in a suitable manner. However to be successful the regulations must be designed to fit the operations being carried out so that they are not ignored or abandoned because they are unworkable. Please let us have sensible regulation, not cosmetic rules or draconian discipline.

Article by Michael Organe, Project Search Ltd