E-cruitment attracts candidates from far and wide. ZDNet Australia discovers companies which claim to steer you to the cream of the e-crop.
E-cruitment is no longer just another "e-" prefixed buzzword. It can be as simple as listing a vacancy on an Internet job board or as advanced as adding an interactive careers section to your company's corporate Web site. And it works. All over the country, IT managers' inboxes are straining under the sheer weight of résumés from eager candidates who use the Web to search for jobs.
Despite the closure of the Australian arm of international job board Monster in July, job boards such as Jobnet, John Fairfax Holding's MyCareer, and News Interactive's CareerOne are attracting rising numbers of visitors. The most popular is Seek, which has over 50 percent market share and attracted 901,057 unique visitors in June (Red Sheriff figures).
Forward-thinking organisations are adding funky new features to their corporate career Web sites, turning them from dry, static, online brochures into places where job seekers can apply for positions, update their résumés, set up automated e-mails to notify them of future positions, and schedule interviews.
Undoubtedly, the Web enables recruiters to cast their net wider than ever before. The trouble is, when you cast your net wider, you tend to reel in a lot of rotten dead fish and mouldy old boots before you find your prize catch.
Cost and time savings from e-cruitment at the front end are, in some cases, cancelled out at the back end, as recruiters filter and process a far greater number of applications.
"Amongst the thousands of resumes an online recruitment drive generates, a few are gold dust, from highly qualified candidates, but hundreds will be from inexperienced applicants who happen to have a Hotmail account," says Brian Fuge, managing director of RoleCall People Systems which designed WERC (Web Enabled Recruitment Centre) to help recruiters manage e-cruitment.
Filter, assess, schedule
The ideal scenario emerging for IT recruiters is to have an integrated e-cruitment system which screens, assesses, and manages applications once they've arrived. The good news is that over the last 12 months companies, such as RoleCall People Systems, have stepped up to offer e-cruitment software and services which tackle this problem.
According to Will Spensley, director at e-cruitment research and advisory company Talent Zone, there are approximately 83 providers of e-cruitment solutions, commonly referred to as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), in Australia.
These include specialist HR software companies, recruitment agencies, Internet job boards, advertising agencies, and psychometric test developers, but they fall into three major categories: direct providers of ATS such as nga.net, RecruitASP, recruitmanager, PageUp, Hire.com, Big Red Sky, PeopleSoft, SnapHire, Kenexa, Recruitsoft; online testing and assessment specialists, such as Onetest; and Internet job boards such as Jobnet and Seek, which offer their own screening and management services.
The direct providers come from different backgrounds and have differing motivations. For example, RecruitASP, whose clients include Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers, is the technology offshoot of Jobnet; recruitmanager, which counts Cap Gemini Ernst & Young amongst its clients, is the e-cruitment arm of advertising company AdCorp; and nga.net, which supplies Ford Motor Company Australia and Westpac, is 30 percent owned by John Fairfax Holdings, so has links to the f2 network's job board MyCareer.
Motivations aside, what can e-cruitment software do for you? At the front end it can automatically export job ads across job boards and a corporate Web site, so candidates see your ad almost as soon as you've decided you need a new staff member.
"To post an ad on a job board costs approximately $100, depending on the job board and the contract," says Daniel Zrno, new products manager at AdCorp, which owns recruitmanager. "A job can be posted directly from a system to a job board within minutes, whilst a press ad can cost up to several thousands and takes several hours to set up and book. Organisations have seen 50 percent cost savings doing it this way," he says.
Once posted online, these systems can filter applications, according to a set of criteria stipulated by the recruiter.
"After screening, clients see between 30 and 50 percent of applications, depending on how the system is set up. A company offering hundreds of graduate positions will receive thousands of applications, so the filtering process is more important, whereas a senior position might attract 20 applications, so filtering is less of an issue", explains Karen Cariss, managing director of PageUp, whose clients include Coles Myer and ANZ.
Online testing
Once you've filtered out the dead wood, e-cruitment tools can assess the abilities of your remaining short list. Whilst some job boards provide their own screening and assessment tools, most organisations use more than one job board, so consistency across hundreds or thousands of applications can be a problem.
Services like recruitmanager push candidates through the same screening tool, in this case eAssessments. This allows recruiters to develop a library of questionnaires to be used at initial application stage. As a recruiter, you can also choose to bolt onto your recruitment process online psychometric and cognitive testing, or specific IT skills tests.
Onetest claims it was Australia's first online assessment provider. It supplies companies such as PageUp and nga.net with its online assessment module and also has a partnership with Seek, offering a cognitive testing service to Seek's corporate clients, called Onetest Express. Earlier this year Onetest launched a new online test called Onetest Values Inventory, which assesses potential clients on their cultural fit.
"This is the first time recruiters have been able to quantify cultural fit using online tools. It was previously left to intuition," says Steven Dahl, managing director of Onetest.
There are concerns about the fairness of online assessments. For example, if the test is conducted in an unsupervised environment there are no guarantees the candidate will not cheat.
"We offer the ability for clients to retest candidates in a supervised environment at a later date, and warn candidates of this from the outset, which usually eliminates the cheaters," says Dahl.
"According to research carried out in the US, 70 percent of candidates admit to lying on their resume, so whilst people question the accuracy or fairness of online assessments, in comparison only 10 percent of test scores are found to be inaccurate or misleading, and all of them are discovered prior to hiring," he adds.
Trevor Vas, executive director of management consultancy human capital management solutions (hcms) says online assessments eliminate bias.
"Candidates from certain social demographics who may have previously been disadvantaged are judged exactly the same as other candidates. It's a more transparent process," says Vas.
In addition to its partnership with Onetest, Seek offers its own resume filtering products. "They are not as sophisticated as those offered by providers such as RecruitASP and PageUp, but it is not our core offering," says product manager Sean Ickowicz.
"At first we showed resistance to these e-cruitment software providers, but we have had to change our tune and interact with them as more clients use them to post job ads across job boards and manage their applications," he says.
Ickowicz says increasing numbers of recruiters are customising their online applications forms, rather than using the standard Seek form. "For recruiters this means time savings, as the applications go straight to the recruiter's database, cutting out the need for data entry," he says.
So now you have screened, filtered, and tested your initial applicants, is the Internet's role now complete? No, says RoleCall's Fuge.
