Recruitment in the electronic age

A history

Applications

The history of electronic recruitment is not very inspiring. Typically, the recruiter accepts applications via email, fax and paper. With all but the emailed applications, the recruiter has to photocopy and deliver the application to the appropriate line manager(s) for review. In all cases, the review process can be lengthy and unstructured.

Interviews

The interview process has also been handled in an unstructured way, with interviewers unaware of the real restrictions that the Data Protection Act (DPA) places on them. So often, the understanding is that paper interview notes are not covered by the DPA and so any derogatory, racist or sexist comments are safe within these paper notes.

Candidates

In general, candidates are only able to contact a single person within the recruitment function about a single vacancy. Should that candidate be better suited to another vacancy, it is unlikely, particularly in a large organisation, that this will be acted upon, thus losing a suitable candidate to the company.

Advertising

Historically, advertising campaigns have been the preserve of individual operating divisions within a company. This can send confusing messages to the candidate and result in multiple inappropriate contact points being made available to candidates.

Moving into the 21st century

Now we have a wide base of Internet-savvy candidates, companies are starting to wake up to the possibilities of electronic communications. From email to the Internet, the push is to make the recruitment process faster, cheaper and more effective. In today’s job market, it is important to have the highest profile among your potential candidates so that you can get that early win.

With the growing recognition among companies that the old ways aren’t always the best, there are signs of change. The solution providers are increasingly moving to browser based products to provide a simpler interface to their systems. However, the majority of providers are still locked into the client-server model, which requires a certain amount of (expensive) support.

Exploiting the Internet

With a wider acceptance of Internet-based products, the ASP market is starting to take off, with new products coming to market on what seems like a daily basis. The potential choice can prove confusing to those companies who have previously relied on a single large supplier or in-house development teams to provide solutions for them. This route often proves expensive and, as the personnel involved generally come form an IT department, there may be a lack of understanding of the business requirements. Recruitment is a “people” business and has a very different profile to, for instance, an accounting system.

By using a web-based product, whether it uses the ASP model or not, companies can gain a competitive edge in various ways.

Deployment
Web-based applications need only a suitable browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape on the client PC. As just about every PC is rolled out with a browser installed, there is no software to be loaded on the PC client.

Accessibility
So long as the company user has access to the Internet accessibility to the system will not pose a problem. What can throw a spanner in the works is when the IT department is reluctant to relinquish control over access to software. This can be more of a problem than it first appears and is discussed elsewhere in this article.

Breaking the mould.
Historically, the IT department has developed, implemented and maintained software for the company. They have also ordered, built and run the company’s hardware. With both the ASP and hosted models, the IT department lose their control over the software and hardware. This can result in a severe loss of face, so it’s imperative to involve them from the very outset and give them the opportunity to buy-in to the project. There is a third option available that helps to overcome this loss of face. It may be possible to run the system on the company’s own hardware, even if it lives outside the company’s premises. This can help assuage fears of incompatibility. It also gives the potential for bringing the system in-house at some future date.

Firewalls.
With a reliance on Internet access, it can sometimes be difficult to break through the company’s firewall. This is not as trivial as it seems. Part of the rationale for selecting a web-based product is the availability to its users. So long as at least a dial-up connection is available, users of the system can access it from anywhere in the world, day or night. There are no security issues with the company firewall, although response time over the Internet is a variable factor that cannot be assessed. Company firewalls are there to keep out unwanted visitors and viruses and are generally quite stringent in their access rules. The adoption of a web-based solution may break one or more of the rules, although this scenario may not occur; it all depends on your company’s set up.

Once-only data entry.
With a web-based system, it is possible to remove the onerous task of typing in CVs and other personal information by placing this task in the hands of the candidate or agency. A useful by-product of this labour-saving (for the recruiter) device is that details have a lower likelihood of incorrect entry. However, it is worth remembering that you are trying to attract candidates, so don’t simply transfer your paper application forms to the new system, take time to talk to your supplier and implement a more appropriate solution.

Maintaining appointment bookings.
An extremely useful feature coming through in some packages is that of on-line interview booking. This obviates the need for multiple letters and telephone calls and gives the candidate or agency the opportunity to choose from a selection of dates, times and even locations. A very useful feature, this could be enhanced by dynamic links into your calendar software, Microsoft Outlook for example. However, my own experiences lead me to believe that this feature is still some way off. As a result, there will still be a manual intervention to record interview dates and times in personal calendars.

Interview notes.
I mentioned earlier that many interviewers were unaware or ill informed about the status of interview notes. With a well thought out system, interview notes can be recorded by several means, resulting in high visibility of the notes to other interviewers. There is a strong requirement here for the senior management to ensure that interviewers follow company policy and always record the results of interviews on the system.

Strong process flow.
With the application of a new system, it is often easier to influence how recruiters and interviewers operate. By choosing the most suitable system, it is possible to increase this influence, resulting in a stronger adherence to the defined process. Where recruiters or interviewers stray from the defined process, it should be made difficult for them to make progress. A good example is that of agencies faxing CVs directly to a line manager. If there is no way for the manager to get this information on to the system, book interviews and generally progress the application, then these practices will soon die of their own accord. Where an agency Extranet exists, the rules can be made more severe, i.e. if you don’t do things our way you don’t get our business.

Talent Pools.
With paper and email-based systems, there is little opportunity to maintain a Talent Pool of candidates. What a waste! By recording this information in a searchable form, the company gains in many ways. After all, why go through an expensive recruitment campaign when you can locate candidates with the relevant skills from your candidate database?

Advertising.
The traditional approach to recruitment advertising has been to produce advertisements for various publications with a return postal address and latterly, an email address. Within the advertisement you may have asked respondents to write for an application form. This slows down the application process enormously and could result in candidates being put off from applying. With new techniques on the Internet, it is now easier than ever to publish your vacancies online and to refer to your web site within a conventional paper advertisement. This has two (and maybe more!) advantages. Firstly, you cut out the paper and emails, as the candidate enters their own biographical details and attaches their CV. Secondly, should the candidate be interested in your company, they should get the opportunity to browse other jobs on your site, potentially filling a completely different vacancy. A further advantage to this approach is, depending on the system in use, the potential for recruiters to be alerted to the presence of the application so that the candidate can be processed in a speedily.

Agencies.
A major problem facing recruiters can be the aggressive nature of some agencies, which will deluge the recruiter and/or line manager with as many CVs as possible. Such agencies seem intent on providing quantity, not quality, and this approach can hide the true worth of the agency to your company. By worth, I mean - is this agency providing quality candidates at a sufficient percentage of the total candidates supplied. If the percentage is too low, then maybe you should be entering into a dialogue with the agency in order to redress this imbalance. The ultimate threat though, is to remove them from your supplier list, something that really concentrates the mind. It is also possible to rank agencies by the quality of their candidates. There are several ways of measuring this and is worth discussing with your supplier, as they may have had relevant experience with other customers. Such ranking can help to identify unrecognised stars and failures in your selected agencies.

Time to Hire.
By adopting a more open recruitment approach, it is possible to reduce the time to hire. Indeed, this should be a feature of any new system that you purchase, as it brings benefits in a competitive marketplace. Information should be available to help you iron out bottlenecks in the recruitment process and, potentially, individuals who are causing those bottlenecks.

Cost of Hire.
With all your recruitment information online, it is possible to monitor the cost of hire much more closely. There is an opportunity here to drive down costs, particularly if you are monitoring your agencies’ performance, in which case you can reduce your supplier list and negotiate a better deal with them.

HR Systems

All of the above is fine but how do you get information into your HR system? Some suppliers will try to sell you their HR package on the back of their recruitment offering. You need to think very hard about this approach, as your company will probably have an expensive HR system already in place. You may be in the fortunate position of choosing the supplier of your HR system to provide your recruitment solution. This certainly removes some of the interfacing problems but the recruitment offering may have been developed independently of the HR system.

Most (if not all) suppliers will be able to provide an interface file that can be loaded into your HR system. A small amount of extra work is involved but the rewards are realised in the recruitment system. This is the most likely scenario that you will encounter.

The Way Forward

First Steps

So far this article has only listed the benefits (and some shortcomings) of moving to a web-based recruitment system. That’s all very well but what happens next? Well, the first and most important thing is to get your board behind you. Without their support, any plans that you may have will be dead in the water. This has to be followed up by getting the business involved; after all, it will impact them directly. Get them involved and excited about the prospects for the new system. At this stage, I wouldn’t expect you to have selected a new system. Instead, you should be working with the business to draw out their requirements so that selection of a system becomes a lot easier.

Where Next

From personal experience, I have found that locating suitable suppliers is a difficult task. Call on any industry contacts to pick their brains about any news items they may have seen or companies that may have contacted them. Go to seminars and exhibitions; you’ll be surprised at just how many suppliers there are out there!

Personal Experiences

As an independent consultant working on just such a project for one of the Big 5 accounting firms, I had first-hand experience on all of the foregoing. I learnt many valuable lessons from the project, as will you if you decide to take this route to recruitment. Involvement is the key word in all of this. If you can get your recruitment community on board and eager to make the change, the implementation will be so much easier for you. Pick a good system – not the one with most bells and whistles – and you will find that it slips on like a comfortable glove.

Happy Recruiting!

About the author

David Raison is an independent consultant with over 30 years experience in IT. He has implemented many projects in such diverse areas as Banking, Insurance and, of course, Recruitment.