The internet has become an integral part of most corporate recruitment strategies, but recruiting online means a lot more than just having a web site, according to Frank Heasley, PhD, President and CEO, MedZilla.com, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that targets jobseekers and HR professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science.
Your online presence may be the first information that your prospective candidate sees about your company, so it''s important that your advertisements represent your firm as though you were going to physically introduce a candidate to your business, Dr. Heasley says.
Poorly written ads, or worse, blind ads or ads with little or no contact information, can hurt your chances for successful recruiting and may actually damage candidates'' perception of your firm. It''s important to remember that the top candidates are the ones with the least amount of time. If you make it difficult to apply to your jobs unless they actually go to your web site, you will probably lose some of the best people.
Your most effective online recruitment strategy will be two fold: Firstly, you must provide compelling information and content in your online advertising. Secondly, your process must interface transparently with the candidate sources, which are the major job boards in your niche.
Everyone''s doing it
Research indicates that nearly all the large corporations are using their Web sites to recruit employees. In April 2002, iLogos Research, a research and consulting firm covering online human capital management trends and best practice methodologies, reported the results of its Global 500 Web site Recruiting Survey. According to iLogos Research, a division of Recruitsoft, a provider of staffing management solutions, 100% of the companies in the healthcare sector of the global 500 corporations (500 largest companies in the world ranked by revenue) use corporate Web sites for recruiting.
The new challenge
They [companies] are using their corporate career sites, and so now their challenge is to make sure that they are optimized to look at their whole process and to think about how they can create or maintain a competitive edge, says Alice Snell, vice president of iLogos Research.
Most companies have the basics needed for successful online recruiting, according to Nels Wroe; recruitment portfolio manager at SHL, Inc. SHL is a worldwide company specializing in occupational psychology and Internet recruitment selection systems. SHL clients include Alegent Health, Perrier and Neiman Marcus.
These basics include making career sections prominent parts of corporate homepages. Not only make it prominent on your homepage but make sure that your Web address is on almost everything that you send out that an applicant might see, Wroe says.
According to Snell, iLogos research on best practices for corporate career site recruiting has shown there are three goals for the front end, or public side, of these sites. One is to attract candidates through a variety of methods, including things like a direct link from the home page to the career site. The second goal is to convince job seekers once they have come onto the site that there are opportunities of interest and that the employer is of interest to them. Goal number three is to capture the information from that candidate and to process it.
The key, Snell says, is to have that data flow seamlessly through the process as quickly as possible. We know that in today''s environment job seekers and candidates are very time sensitive, she says.
Make sure that the whole process of recruiting and drawing someone into the organization is fast, Wroe says. That means you''re going to have to respond to them quickly, process their paperwork quickly, and make sure that you can get them to the next step as quickly as possible. If the rest of your procedures in your back office of recruiting are not up to snuff, you''re going to lose out.
Wroe suggests that those hiring take advantage of the latest Web recruiting tools, including tools that allow you to screen and select candidates online. They can help you increase the speed at which you respond to candidates. We''re getting the recruiting and communication pieces down pat and now we can take the next step. We can do a lot more of the screening and selection of candidates on the Web than ever before. That is the real solution to solving the recruiting problem over the long-term.
Real-time recruiting on the Web
The new software offering these solutions is tied to the backend of corporate sites. In some cases, you''ll find companies accepting resumes online. They''ll print them out and scan them into a database, which is very old technology and was the first wave of online recruiting. Today, with a system like Recruitsoft, when a candidate is on the corporate career Web site, the candidate is actually in the guts of the backend system, says Diane Pardee, vice president of corporate marketing and communications for Recruitsoft.
Pardee explains that Recruitsoft technology, among the backend solutions available today, makes it possible for real-time interaction with qualified candidates. What happens is this: A candidate is on the corporate site, answering questions about skills that are particular to jobs. The information being entered by the candidate is looked at, compared and quantified in real time on the backend. An alert is sent out to a hiring manager or recruiter that there is a candidate online who meets the company''s minimum requirements for the job. At that point, the hiring manager or recruiter can get in contact with the person. Mutual of Omaha went live and the next day had hired someone through the system, Pardee says.
Another client, United Healthcare, which has about 29,000 employees, cut its time to hire from 50 to 75 days to 27, according to Pardee.
Still, Wroe says that with all the bells and whistles, the corporate site will not serve all a company''s recruiting needs. The job board sites will probably see a resurgence of interest. We''re seeing that right now. [For healthcare,] Ö I still think it''s a really solid strategy to make sure that you at least have a presence on the job boards and pull into your homepage. A lot of candidates are really used to starting their job searches at those points, he says. And don''t put all your eggs in one basket. Also, look at your specialty job boards-particularly in healthcare. Stay in front of the healthcare organizations and healthcare job boards. Candidates today are looking for places to congregate. They''re not following the same patterns that we saw two years ago, where they would go to every company''s job site. They want it to be a lot easier. Often you''ll see that candidates will find their favorite places, which are usually one of the job boards, and will tend to start at those favorite places and work from there.
Dr. Heasley agrees. We''ve found that companies who simply put links to their web sites on their ads are less successful than those who supply several means of contact. Candidates are looking for a simple way to find the jobs that match their qualifications and apply to all of them at the same time. In addition, the best candidates tend to have the least amount of time. Many of them simply cannot find the time to go to every employer''s web site, search out the job there, and fill out a completely different application for each one.
About MedZilla.com
Established in mid 1994, MedZilla is the original web site to serve career and hiring needs for professionals and employers in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medicine, science and healthcare. MedZilla databases contain about 10,000 open positions and 10,000 resumes from candidates actively seeking new positions. These resources have been characterized as the largest, most comprehensive databases of their kind on the web in the industries served.
Everyone''s Recruiting Online.
Your company may have a great career site, but the job boards have the candidates!