Online Recruitment Media Version 2.0

OMEís Dominic Sumners reveals the two biggest emerging issues for UK recruiters online

Five months ago I left one of the UKís largest job boards to launch a new company, specialising in helping employers make the most of online. Iíve spent those months out in the market, meeting with large UK employers and finding out what their online recruitment issues are and how they can be solved in a way that delivers the right quality of candidate at the right cost per hire.

Clients weíve met vary from large financial institutions and retailers to smaller specialist organisations but what Iíve noticed is the issues they raise are consistently the same. A typical meeting will go something like this.

25% of our meeting time is spent going through the basics of best practice when recruiting online. This is OMEís core product, profiling of roles, planning the right media, utilising the right product from that media and buying it well. This clearly leads into how the client deals with that response efficiently (or not!!). Iíve been particularly interested to note that there is a higher level of satisfaction with the job boards (, well the good ones at least), than the industry gives itself credit for!.

Yet the remaining 75 per cent of the meeting time is spent discussing two particular connected topics: passive jobseekers and cutting reliance on recruitment consultancies

1. Targeting the passive job seeker online ñ. How to get that brilliant prospective employee who is not actively using job boards, search engines (in recruitment context) or looking at press ads. What successful techniques are being used to get their attention in the course of their online consumption. This leads into discussion of use of referral networks, community sites, contextual serving and blogs but its much more than that. I would best summarise it as ìWhich services are going to provide online recruitmentís Version 2.0.î

2. Reducing reliance on recruitment consultancies. Effective use of jobsites should make this easy for companies but great back end systems and processes allow the client to create a candidate pool, market to them via email and mine the database. There is an acceptance that they will always use consultancies but that increasing direct recruitment is a must for organisations.

Of course many UK companies are still in the early stages of recruiting online but the speed of change is picking up pace and the demands on the online industry will increase. And that can only be a good thing for media, agencies and clients alike.