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.
