Internet changes the way we recruit

How the web is continuing to shape approaches to hiring. By Geoff Curry, managing director of GAAPweb.com.

Geoff Curry

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau £180m was spent on online recruitment last year in the UK. This was a rise of 50% on the previous year and there were bullish predictions for the year ahead.

Whatever your business, using the web to reach candidates is efficient, low cost and immensely flexible. It allows you to bring your employer brand to life in a way never before possible. Indeed who would work for an organisation that doesn’t see the web as integral to both doing business and recruiting staff?

An array of generic job sites allows you to broaden your recruitment message to jobseekers beyond your traditional region or marketplace. Conversely, niche sites allow you to pin-point a demographic from the outset.

Would you join your organisation?

Then there’s the recruitment section of your own corporate site – that on-going project that lives between marketing, IT and HR where companies can post their vacancies. As recruiters become smarter at promoting these, they will continue to grow as a showcase for why a candidate might join one business over another. Have a look at your recruitment portal – would you join an organisation like yours? How good do your competitors look?

Most companies have usually trialled enough of the above to have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. But most don’t yet have a clear strategy of how the internet integrates with their overall recruitment plan. More forward thinking HR teams realise that with the ongoing scarcity of talent, their roles are moving towards those of marketing as they attempt to reach new hires by blending traditional and online media. They understand the building blocks of the online landscape and now they can begin to think about how best to integrate the various components.

However, just as the HR community is reaching this point, the landscape of the internet has moved on and looks set to keep changing. Referred to loosely as Web 2.0, you’re already surrounded by it, whether you realise it or not. Camera phone images from the latest story are now regularly loaded straight onto news sites. Exponential growth of sites such as Myspace, Youtube and Flickr allows users to share thoughts, pictures and video. Amazon enables you to review any book or CD, whilst ebay encourages candid feedback on sellers across its site. And everyone has a blog these days baring their innermost thoughts to anyone who cares to tune in.

Two-way medium

The new web is a two-way medium, where user uploaded content and opinion are as important to other users, if not more so, than many traditional commentators and brands. For the recruitment community this new world offers both opportunity and threat. Like it or not, people will begin to post comments on what it was like to be interviewed by your business, how you faired against competitors, and overall how they viewed the process.

‘I didn’t get the job but what a great company and a useful experience’ is the blog entry you’d love to get from every rejected interviewee. ‘10 things that are rubbish about this organisation’ hopefully won't be closer to the mark. Going forward, recruiting across the web won't just be about what methods you use to fill a role. Existing information will be of increasing importance – for example, feedback from rejected candidates, postings from previous employees and anonymous blogs from inside the business itself.

There was a time when all that mattered in recruitment was the opinion of the boss, or, at a stretch, other employees and the successful applicant. But in the future, everyone will have an opinion of how your business performs when it recruits its next generation of employees. And everyone else will be able to read it.

To find out more about how internet recruitment can deliver the best finance professionals for your organisation, book your place at the CIMA Training Conference on 11 October, at the CBI Conference Centre, London. Visit the conference web page to book your place, benefit from an early booking discount, and read the programme. Alternatively contact Imogen Cooper on 020 8849 2265, or email imogen.cooper@cimaglobal.com.

September 2006