E-Cruiting

After surfing the websites of about 35 vendors, one of my associates in Kingston, Washington bought a mailbox for her new home via e-mail from a mom and pop distributor in Menomonee, Minnesota last week. That’s just one example of how the Internet levels the playing field when it comes to marketing and sales. Size and location have become all but irrelevant because buyers can now compare products, services, and pricing from every vendor with a web presence in just a few clicks of the mouse.

What is being largely overlooked, however, is how the Internet can do the same for smaller employers who are competing against huge corporations – as well as one another – for the best of the nation’s limited labor pool.

I’m not talking about just adding a button that reads “Employment Opportunities” to your home page. While this tactic certainly doesn’t hurt, it only produces reliable results for large, well-known employers-of-choice like Southwest Airlines, GE, and Procter & Gamble. People are drawn to these sites. If you’re not yet an employer-of-choice in your community, you’ll have to be more proactive and creative.

I believe there really are enough quality applicants out there for most of the jobs that go begging today – yours included. Employers are just letting good people slip through their fingers. I see it over and over and over again. There are two shortcomings, two design flaws, that come up in 99.9% of the recruiting system audits we do for employers large and small in every kind of industry.

The first is that job applicants are treated as interruptions. Whether they ask the convenience store clerk for an application or check in with the receptionist in the Personnel Lobby, job applicants are seen as interruptions that take us away from “more important” things. This makes a horrible first impression – especially on the people who would be the best kinds of employees. Employers continue to act as if they are doing jobseekers a favor when in today’s market just the opposite is true.

The second flaw is that employers make the application process difficult. Most still expect applicants to come to them when it is convenient for the employer – during regular business hours. When all the good people who want to work are already working, this practice defies logic. Electronic technology solutions, however, are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and allow working people to easily apply or get information at their convenience.

If your recruiting system has one or both of these common flaws, check out these e-ways to upgrade and get better results:

1. Job Boards– One of the most creative innovations on the Internet isjob boards. The earliest ones were developed to recruit information technology talent and they turned the recruiting industry upside down. As these types of websites proliferated, niche markets were addressed and today you’ll find boards specializing in almost every industry and level of professionalism – from entry-level hourly worker to CEO. I just typed “job boards” in the Google search engine and it came up with the first 10 pages of a total of 12,300 pages of job board websites and information. Now that’s more than I need to know – you too probably – so do a little informal marketing research and ask your employees and people who are like the kinds of applicant’s you’d like to attract what job boards they frequent. (For an idea of how these recruiting sites work, visit www.cstorejobs.com or www.workrover.com.)

2. Let Your Web Site Do the Work– Another good way to use the Internet as a recruiting tool is to design your regular recruitment advertising to push jobseekers to your site to apply. In this way, your traditional classified ad or flier or direct mail piece can be short and sweet. You can user fewer words to simply get the people you’d like to attract intrigued and then direct them to your web site for more information and to read your sales pitch. Use the space to spell out your merits as an employer, to differentiate yourself from competing employers, and to convince the people you want to actually apply and then make it easy for them to do so.

3. Automated Job Hotlines– If you don’t yet have a web presence or won’t use your site for recruiting, look into taking applications by phone. These automated, telephone-based recruiting and screening tools also increase applicant flow by providing applicants accessibility to job information 24/7. By using this kind of interactive voice response technology, you can streamline and automate the recruiting and screening process by phone just as well as you can by Internet.

When the first few steps of the recruiting process are automated via some kind of electronic technology, the employer can present a consistent, favorable image and applicant and employer alike save a tremendous amount of time.

For more information about what’s available to employers (as well as jobseekers) on line, one good place to start is the Internet Public Library at www.ipl.org. (Established by professional librarians to organize and simplify the search for information on the net, this is a good tool to bookmark and use to simplify most any information search.)

Once there, go to the Reference Center, Business & Economics, Employment section and the subcategory “Job Searching and Employee Recruiting.” As well as providing brief descriptions of each resource, links to each site will whisk you right to those of interest. Another useful recruiting information and idea site is www.erxchange.com.

It’s understandable that the business community rushed to e-tailing first as orders and sales are always a first priority. Now it’s time to get a leg up on the worsening labor shortage by being among the first to make the most of electronic opportunities to recruit the people you need to make the products, offer the services, and interact with your customers.

Author Information
Mel Kleiman
Mel Kleiman is a nationally-known authority and consultant on employee recruiting, selection, and retention. This article is excerpted in part from Mel Kleiman’s latest book, "Hire Tough, Manage Easy." He also serves as president of Humetrics, Incorporated, which provides employee recruiting and selection systems, pre-employment testing, as well as educational presentations and in-depth training workshops. For more informationl, contact the FrogPond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email susie@FrogPond.com

Copyright (Reprint Terms)
Copyright 2002, Mel Kleiman. All right reserved. For information contact FrogPond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email susie@FrogPond.com.