placeholder
Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

Run-of-the-mill e-recruitment sites = best practice? - 01/2001

Study of 140 corporate sites

Some companies have mastered e-recruiting; most haven't; and the gap between the best and the worst e-recruiting websites is huge. So says a study of 140 corporate e-recruiting websites undertaken last summer and fall by Cambria Consulting, a Boston-based human resources consulting firm.

What makes the study's findings particularly surprising is the fact that the companies included in the study were largely selected from Fortune Magazine's lists of America's Best Companies to Work for and Most Admired Companies.

It's surprising to find great companies with recruiting websites that offer candidates little more than a post office box to which to send their resumes, said Bernie Cullen, a partner at Cambria Consulting who headed the research team. Clearly, some companies don't realize how big the stakes are. It's estimated that more than two thirds of employers hiring college graduates are recruiting via the Internet, and by 2003, 100 percent of the Global 500 companies are expected to be recruiting via the Internet. With this technology, companies can reach a worldwide pool of potential candidates. They can also cut their costs to find new employees by nearly 90 percent, compared with traditional recruiting techniques.

Asked who's setting the pace in e-recruiting, Cullen pointed to computer and technology companies and to financial service companies that are leading the race to e-banking. The people who helped create the Internet are using it to scour the world for outstanding job candidates, said Cullen. They don't just tell candidates to send in resumes. They question them interactively on the website about their experience and interests and then direct them to the specific jobs for which they are best qualified. By pre-qualifying candidates in this way, the companies, as well as candidates, save an enormous amount of time. Instead of reading through stacks of resumes, recruiters can go directly to a short list of the most qualified candidates.

The study also found that in many instances e-recruiting led to the most hits on corporate web-sites and provided their major economic justification. For a number of companies, e-recruiting was the first, if not the only, e-business application.

The goal of the study was to identify best practices for e-recruiting websites and, in that way, help human-resource professionals use e-recruiting more effectively. According to the study, the most effective sites share many of the following characteristics:

They understand their target audiences and address their interests - candidates can navigate the site easily and quickly link to career pages and job openings - career opportunities and individual jobs are described in much greater detail than in typical help-wanted ads - qualifying categories, such as location, job function and key-word search, help candidates zero in on the jobs for which they are most qualified - graphics are attractive and easy to read - information about the company, including profiles of archetypal employees, gives candidates a sense of what working for the company would be like - candidates can paste resumes to application page, email them to a recruiter or create online applications, keyed to specific job openings, with pull-down menus letting them enter information with a few clicks - job carts let candidates apply for multiple openings - self-assessment quizzes ask candidates about their experience and interests and direct them to careers they'd be good at and enjoy the most - search engines let candidates create personal profiles in the company's database and then return to their profiles later to update them. The computer periodically revisits their personal data, compares it with available job openings and alerts them to positions that match their qualifications.


The best interactive websites do a good job of qualifying candidates and then forwarding information about the best prospects to recruiters and line managers seeking to fill specific openings, said Cullen. As a result, the people who have to make the hiring decision review only those resumes that fit their specifications and interview only candidates who have been thoroughly pre-qualified. The entire process is very fast. While competitors are wading through stacks of resumes, a company with a 'best practices' staffing Website can pinpoint the top prospects and make offers to those it wishes to hire. It's a huge competitive advantage.

According to Cullen, long-term success at finding, selecting and hiring outstanding employees depends not simply on a great website but on an integrated e-staffing effort. Leading companies have fully integrated their staffing processes making them not only paperless and efficient but also highly effective. They have re-engineered these processes so that the right people have the right information at the right time for evaluating the right type of candidates. Designing effective e-Recruiting sites has been an important catalyst for these major redesign efforts.

www.cambriaconsulting.com.