Two years ago, at the height of the IT skills shortage, Keith Vencel thought he had come up with a great way for his company, Sutter Health, to find more candidates and fill positions quickly: He'd have the company post openings online and accept candidate résumés via email.

Vencel, a project manager at the nonprofit health care network, was half-right. Moving postings online generated a lot more résumésâ€"-300,000 a year for fewer than 10,000 job openings. But it didn't make the hiring process go any faster. In fact, so many resumes began flooding in by email and the network's Web site that they were simply dumped in a pile to await attention from affiliates' human resources departments. And there they sat, sometimes for weeks.

Not surprisingly, Vencel and other Sutter Health officials soon decided the network didn't simply need more resumes from IT and other job candidates; it needed better ones and a quicker, more efficient online process for sorting through them to find the best job candidates.

Sutter Health got exactly that last July when it signed on with Recruitsoft e-recruiting ASP (application service provider) that hosts Sutter Health's job site. Besides simply posting job openings and collecting résumés, Recruitsoft gives Sutter Health an automated way to evaluate, rank and match IT and other job candidates with specific openings. That's helped Sutter cut the recruiting process from weeks to days in most cases, Vencel said.

Sutter Health certainly isn't the only enterprise that found its initial foray into e-recruiting less than satisfying. The first generation of company-specific recruiting sites, ASP services and online talent marketplaces may have generated lots of résumés, but, said Maria Schafer, an analyst for Meta Group, they "so far are not living up to expectations" that they would allow employers to quickly target and hire the best candidates possible.

That, Schafer said, is because many haven't provided the filters and other tools needed to help employers home in on the best candidate for the jobâ€"-the C++ developer, for example, who's had exactly the right kind of experience on exactly the right kind of project.

Enter the ASP

That, however, is beginning to change. Organisations such as Sutter Health are hooking up with e-recruiting job sites and ASPs that are moving well beyond basic online job board functionality to offer a range of new services that are making e-recruiting more efficient, faster and more valuable.

E-recruiting sites and ASPs such as Recruitsoft; PureCarbon; BrassRing; TalentFusion; and Development Dimensions International Inc are offering online tools that allow enterprises not only to quickly evaluate and rank candidates but also to automatically direct candidates to the most appropriate positions and track hot candidates, even those who may initially decide to work elsewhere.

While such features are making e-recruiting more valuable, experts caution that there are still gaps. Few if any sites, for example, allow enterprises to easily manage candidates for both full-time and contract work online, Meta Group's Schafer said. Therefore, experts say, enterprises should not drop more traditional methods of recruiting entirely in favour of e-recruiting.

Lower costs, too
Despite the slowing economy and initial problems with e-recruiting, experts say, finding the right IT talent fast is still a priority for most e-businesses, and doing it online is increasingly popular. Meta Group estimates that the number of enterprises using the Web for recruiting has doubled in the last year to 40 percent. And, according to International Data, the top 10 worldwide e-recruiting service vendors collectively saw their revenues grow by 232 percent between 1999 and 2000.

Much of that growth, experts say, probably relates to one simple fact: E-recruiting IT talent, though imperfect so far, can be significantly less costly than other forms of recruiting.

"The cost savings will come from eliminating [recruitment] agency fees," Schafer said. "The agencies are the potential losers here," she said, because their fees start at 20 percent to 30 percent of the first-year salary of the new hire, a huge cost to any company, particularly for the hiring of highly paid IT professionals. By contrast, some job boards, ASP services and talent e-market places charge far lessâ€"in some cases, only a few hundred dollars per hire plus monthly hosting fees.

Zeroing in on skills

Cutting recruiting costs isn't the onlyâ€"-or even the primary-â€"attraction of e-recruiting for some organisations, however. Sutter Health, for example, wanted a way to affordably and quickly deliver qualified candidates for jobs at the network's affiliate hospitals and doctor's offices. After spending six months evaluating 12 other similar services, Sutter Health in July signed a deal with Recruitsoft, which is hosting the careers section of the Sutter Health Web site (so far, hosting listings for jobs at 26 of the 42 offices of the network's 27 affiliate agencies). Recruitsoft provides a centralised database for candidate information and helps the network prioritise candidate leads by asking candidates detailed questions online, Vencel said. The latter feature has so far proved the biggest benefit.

"The skill-based questions are the key feature," he said. "Each candidate completes questions about their job experience, specific achievements and soft skills, and they're ranked in sequence from the least to the most qualified for a given position."

Candidates who aren't a perfect match for one job are automatically encouraged to apply for other jobs if the system finds a better match, Vencel said.

Pricing for the service ranges from US$250 to US$500 for each candidate hired, depending on the quantity of hires made in a given month, along with a US$1,000 monthly Web site hosting fee, a Recruitsoft representative said.

After several months of using the hosted service and with a rollout to the rest of the network's affiliates under way, Vencel said, the efficiency gains the network has realised have been significant even though the service hasn't yet resulted in recruiting cost savings. "We're spending the same amount of money on recruitment now as a couple of years ago, but this avenue is more targeted and is leading to some better candidates," he said.

Some 1,200 job candidates are listed in Sutter Health's Recruitsoft database now, along with listings for 1,600 open jobs. Most important, Vencel said, the network is receiving more than 30 résumés per week that meet every qualification for certain open jobs, far more than it received in a given week before. In addition to the increase in highly targeted job applications, the system allows the network's human resources managers to respond to those job seekers much more quickly, since they're not wasting time evaluating inappropriate applications, Vencel added.

The next goal is to integrate Recruitsoft into the network's Lawson Software HR management system, a project Sutter Health plans to complete early next year, Vencel said.

Even while Sutter Health is increasingly satisfied with its e-recruiting efforts, the organisation isn't giving up on traditional methods, including local television, newspaper and online advertising, along with employee referrals.

This multipronged approach is the best way to go, experts say, at least until e-recruiting ASPs improve and prove their return on investment.

Seeing the light

Another company that is tapping into the advanced features of e-recruiting ASPs is Ditech Communications, a maker of optical networking equipment, and its optical communications equipment subsidiary, Altamar Networks. Both, despite the slowing economy, are desperate for hardware, software and network engineers. How desperate? In October, the company will raffle off a US$40,000 BMW to employees who have referred successful IT hires, said Dave Forbes, marketing communications director for both Ditech and Altamar.

Like Sutter Health, Ditech originally launched its own recruiting site to collect résumés but became dissatisfied with the results. The site was too difficult to maintain and wasn't producing enough well-qualified candidates. So Ditech turned to e-recruiter PureCarbon. For US$500 per month, PureCarbon hosts the career section for Ditech's jobs. Soon the ASP will begin hosting the Altamar job site as well, Forbes said.

But the PureCarbon service, dubbed JobPlanet, unlike Ditech's home-grown recruiting site, goes far beyond a simple job-posting board. It includes a job-agent feature that lets candidates search open positions against a detailed skills profile and notifies candidates when jobs come up that meet their qualifications. In addition, the site helps Ditech track and keep in touch with candidates who were interviewed but chose to join other companies. In some cases, Forbes said, those candidates have had changes of heart about the jobs they choseâ€"-giving Ditech another chance to woo them.

For some companies, using advanced e-recruiting ASPs is not only helping them quickly sift through mountains of candidates to find the right people, it's also saving them money. Systems integrator Computer Sciences, for example, is using Eclaro to quickly qualify and hire contract workers. The Eclaro online marketplace helps the company avoid spending time on unqualified candidates and paying steep fees to traditional recruiters.

Three years ago, CSC, which has 6,000 IT jobs a year to fill, was taking résumés online through its corporate site as well as using traditional recruiters, newspaper ads and employee referrals. But, said Bill Gunn, director of employment services, "The vast majority of the résumés we received were from people who didn't have the right qualifications."

And, Gunn said, those who were hired were coming at a premium. The traditional recruiters were charging 40 percent of the first-year salary for each IT hire, he said.

A year ago, CSC signed up with Eclaro, which lets contract IT workers bid on jobs and charges just 15 percent on each hireâ€"-a significant savings. While CSC hasn't stopped using other recruitment tools and avenues, its reliance on expensive recruitment services has lessened because it hires more workers through Eclaro.

While cutting recruiting costs may be a nice bonus, the real return on investment for companies using advanced e-recruiting services will come from being able to quickly find and hire better-qualified IT workers, experts say. More résumés from laid-off dot-commers may be out there, experts say. But they're not necessarily people you would want to hire.

And making the wrong choice can be expensive. Simply getting a new hire on board can cost a third or more of that worker's first-year salary.

So, experts say, the slowing economy not withstanding, employers need to use every method at their disposalâ€"-including new e-recruiting toolsâ€"-to find the right IT job candidates quickly.

"With the slowing economy, there are more tech people out there, but they're not necessarily better quality," said David Foote, managing partner and research director at Foote Partners.

Best practices for finding talent online

Even in a slowing economy, many companies are scrambling to find better ways to reel in IT talent. Online recruitment tools and services are proliferating rapidly, but experts say it's crucial to have a game plan for deploying them and tracking their effectiveness. Here are some tips from recruitment experts on the best way to do e-recruiting:

• Make sure your company's Web site and outside job board listings provide as much information as possible about open jobs, the benefits they offer and the skills they require. Accept résumés online and devote enough staff to cull them. Respond promptly to eligible job seekers.

• Know what you're paying for. Some e-recruitment services are simple job boards that put newspaper-style ads online; others are ASPs that enable your company to track potential candidates and notify them if jobs open up that meet their qualifications. Shop around to get the best price.

• Don't bet the farm on online recruiting tools. Many companies will want to continue to use more traditional recruitment services for hiring certain employees, such as executive-level staff. In addition, take advantage of your best recruitment toolâ€"-your current employees.

  How to slice and dice a résumé

  How are the more sophisticated e-recruiting tools and services helping employers select standout job candidates from a sea of electronic résumés? It's not rocket science, but it does involve some number crunching and even some psychology.

  Many hosting services for corporations' job sites go beyond simply collecting résumés and sending them to human resources managers.

  Using sophisticated data mining and collaborative filtering techniques, they parse through detailed information submitted online by job seekers, then they rank applicants based on their qualifications for a given job.

  The factors used to compile the rankings include obvious qualifications such as professional certifications held by IT workers. But they also include indications of psychological makeup that could suggest a job seeker might, for example, have the ability to excel in a specific aspect of IT such as project management.

  How can these online tools judge whether an IT candidate has something as nebulous as project organisation or leadership potential?

  "It's called predicted competency matching. We take the job seeker through questions that can predict their ability to motivate a team," said Michael McNeal, chief industry evangelist at PureCarbon, an e-recruiting ASP.

  The questions, similar to those on the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test, can seem strange or esoteric. But, McNeal said, they deliver interesting and useful results. "You'd be surprised what you can learn by asking a candidate whether they frequent museums," he said.

  Some personality traits can predict certain aspects of on-the-job performance. If the job requires a worker to make split-second decisions without waiting for input from colleagues, for example, employers will want candidates with the intestinal fortitude to make such decisions and take the heat if they prove wrong, McNeal said.

  The industrial psychology represented in the increasingly detailed questions being asked in online job applications is helping employers develop standards for "ideal" applicants.

  And, by allowing candidates to tweak their online profiles as they rack up new accomplishments, ASPs such as PureCarbon are helping employers build increasingly accurate and useful databases about passive job seekers who might not be in the market now but want to have résumés on file at companies where they would apply if the right job emerged, according to McNeal.

  "The profile evolves as the job seeker enters more data," he said.

  And, as companies develop the need for IT workers with more complex skill sets, such online tools can potentially make the recruitment task simpler for human resources managers by enabling them to search for candidates based on a wide range of experiences and competencies.

  This should enable employers to identify the right candidates for specific jobs more quickly than if they were simply comparing two résumés side by side, according to McNeal.
  

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