Recruitment 2.0
By Belinda White | thebigchair.com.au | 22 February
It’s the year 2012 and you’re looking for a new job. You’ve spent time online, browsing corporate career websites and watching short videos to gain an overview of each employer. You’ve also viewed video interviews with employees and exchanged emails with them to gain ‘the inside scoop.’
Now that you’ve narrowed your search to an employer that matches your values and career development goals, you have a ten minute instant message (IM) conversation with a recent recruit, where she gives you some first-hand insights into the company, as well as its recruitment and on-boarding process.
The next step is a computer role simulation to find the position that you’ll be most satisfied with. After linking by email to current employees in the positions, you’re invited to submit a video application. Of course, the website provides guidelines on how to do that easily and quickly.
An internal recruiter conducts a twenty minute video interview using Skype and sets up a series of face to face interviews for the following week. Because you can view video profiles of the people who will be interviewing you, you’re better able to connect with the panel and ultimately land the job.
Welcome to recruitment 2.0 where, according to experts, more than 80 per cent of the recruitment process will be conducted on the internet.
Going beyond the ‘online brochure’
Kevin Wheeler, president, Global Learning Resources, will tell delegates at the Australasian Talent Conference on April 14-16 that the best practice recruitment model of the future is based on web 2.0 technology.
“The majority of corporate recruitment websites are little more than online brochures: nice, boring and full of corporate-speak. These websites are designed by committee, written by PR departments, and massaged by lawyers until nothing of much interest is left.
“By contrast, a web 2.0 recruitment website is alive with interactivity, allowing control and input from the candidate and providing information in a variety of formats such as video, audio, graphics, and text. Web 2.0 sites tend to focus on blogs, wikis, and chat and they keep the company boilerplate to a minimum,” he said.
According to Wheeler, the online trend is being driven by technology natives - younger people who have grown up in a multimedia world.
“The advent of YouTube, cheap video cameras, ubiquitous broadband connections, and sophisticated video-savvy workers means that video tours of corporate campuses, as well as interview clips of employees, management, and the CEO, are all becoming requisite to a positive website experience. Good websites reduce the number of words and add more graphics, pictures, videos, and live interviews to engage potential employees,” he said.
Powerful search tools
According to Lisa Burquest, group manager, resourcing at Origin Energy, online sourcing is helping to fill critical roles, where traditional techniques aren’t effective.
“We have some very hard to fill, specialist roles at Origin where the talent pool isn’t just small, it’s spread out across the world. For example, we may need to find a photovoltaic engineer who specialises in solar energy - which is certainly not a common job,” she said.
Working with consultants at Human Capital Management Systems, Burquest has employed internet-based ‘spider searches’ to find these people, regardless of where they are in the world.
“This method is unbelievably powerful. We define some key words, and then the search delves into thousands of places to come up with either a cluster of professionals or individuals we can target. The results simply blow the hiring managers away when we come to them with a list of top talent,” she said.
Once they have the names however, the next part of Origin’s challenge is attracting them - often from overseas.
“We are developing a dedicated micro-site for potential international employees, which will have a whole lot of information not just about Origin, but also the Australian lifestyle and the process of relocating here,” Burquest says.
The new networking
Another hot topic in recruitment is the use of social networking websites such as Facebook and Bebo. While social networking technology only hit the mainstream in 2007, the Recruitment & Consulting Services Association (RCSA) has found that 38 per cent of recruitment professionals are already using it.
According to Wheeler, recruiters and employers are turning to social networking, partly in response to a decline in the number of active jobseekers.
“The booming job market has meant that many job ads fail to net the right applicants, so instead, employers and recruiters are looking for new and different talent pools.
“Professional and special interest groups on a social networking site, for example, are a rich resource. Not only can you find recommendations from industry contacts, but you will connect with passive jobseekers that aren’t hitting the job boards each week, but may see your job ad by chance,” he said.
Social networking is also proving to be a great employer branding tool. This is particularly so for companies targeting a younger demographic.
“Lots of younger people gauge your brand and your ‘cool’ factor by whether or not you have a profile on these social networks,” Wheeler said.
“It’s not just useful for employers: individuals are also creating their own recruitment-oriented profiles, which are effectively online resumes, in the hope that recruiters will find them.”
Beyond paper and pencils
There are some other emerging technologies, Wheeler explains, that are yet to hit the mainstream but give a glimpse into the increasing sophistication of the recruitment process.
“For a long time now, organisations have used paper-and-pencil tests to assess candidates' personality, cultural fit, intelligence, and aptitude. Some of the tests have been adapted for the internet, but many have not. Recently, online simulations have emerged, especially in assessing call centre staff and other positions where skills are straightforward and success is measurable in quantitative ways,” he explains.
With staff retention now one of the top challenges for employers, getting the job fit right at the outset is seen as crucial.
“Alongside an increased interest in assessment are tools that attempt to match candidates to positions. This approach encourages candidates to create extensive profiles that include screening and assessment data. The more complete the candidate's profile, the more successful the job matching process.
“Over the next five years, we will see a steady increase in the number of tools and the amount of energy that will be used to apply more stringent competency criteria to positions to meet legal requirements and to improve the quality of candidates,” Wheeler predicts.
