A Blueprint for Recruiting on the Web

Recruiting great people has never been more important-but there's never been a recruiting toolset like the Web.. Buried among 2 billion Web pages are more than 40,000 job boards and resume banks, 200 million HTML resumes and home pages, and more than 2 million company Web sites -- along with hundreds of thousands of colleges, professional organizations, user groups, news and trade publications, and forums and other communities based on skills, industry, and other business connectors.

The 350 million people on the Internet today are scattered throughout those pages: looking for jobs, reading the news, playing games, discussing their projects, learning new skills, working, playing, and collaborating at all hours of the day. It's a recruiter's dream and a time management nightmare.

To complicate matters further, for almost a decade now vendors everywhere have been scurrying to build better mousetraps for attracting, evaluating, and hiring candidates. So, besides 40,000 job boards, we now have thousands of Internet ad agencies, job posting companies, Web-based employee referral systems, corporate alumni centers, search engines, meta-search engines, and spiders that find candidates, as well as several hundred applicant-tracking systems with screening and assessment options.

In 2000, Forrester Research and other analysts predicted that proprietary end-to-end recruiting systems would soon emerge to make order out of the chaos and save the day. But in 2001, the floor fell out of the market, the big contenders flamed out, and the one-stop Web recruiting business plans joined the other walking dead of the Internet.

We're left with a complicated, balkanized marketplace, filled with solutions that promise to be a global e-recruiting answer but only solve their own sliver of the puzzle. The experts, analysts, and consultants haven't helped much either. They're like the Indian parable of the three blind men and the elephant: one feels the tusk, one the foot, and one the tail. The man who feels the tusk is sure the elephant is a ploughshare. The one who feels the foot is sure the elephant is a tree, and the one who feels the tail insists that the elephant is a brush. The big thinkers that big corporations tend to look to in times of big change just haven't been able to see the whole elephant, either.

So, for the foreseeable future, the 2 billion Web pages, tens of millions of candidates, and thousands of Web-based recruiting vendors will remain a swirling soup. The promise of the Web is better, faster, cheaper recruiting. But how do you organize this confusing jumble to bring you higher-quality candidates, in less time, for less money?

First you need a clear understanding of the traditional recruitment process and the new options enabled by the Web -- then you need a plan. In this chapter, we'll look at a blueprint for e-recruiting that transforms the important milestones along the old recruiting path into a new, sequential plan for recruiting on the Web. There are five stages to this new process:

1. Recruit Your Friends: Build employee referral and corporate alumni systems.
2. Create or Enhance Your Organization's Recruiting Web Site: Build and drive traffic to your own Web site -- and build communities of candidates for just-in-time recruiting.
3. Attract the Best Active Candidates: Advertise to job seekers in career hubs, niche boards, and communities.
4. Find Passive Candidates: Use active search techniques to find candidates hidden inside companies, colleges, organizations, and other destinations.
5. Assess Your Applicants: Screen, test, and evaluate your pipeline with new Web-based tools.

At each stage there are opportunities to save money and time and to target better candidates by using the Web. Let's take a brief look at each in turn, and then at some ways to prepare the ground for a successful recruitment plan.

Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.