E-recruiting's role in a mixed-bag
job market
By: Lisette Hilton
Source: MedZilla.com
The pendulum has swung from an employee-driven
to employer-driven job market in areas such as technology; yet pockets
of health care remain desperate for qualified candidates. Recruiters
and employers are having to sift through too many resumes in same cases
and too few in others.
"This time last year, the employers were
hunting the job market with a shot gun. The applicants then were taking
the rifle approach and knew they could be very selective. Now it's
flip-flopped. Now the companies are holding the rifle. The people
are using the shotgun," said Joe Sommers, managing director for
HRAlliance, LLC. Based in Dallas, Texas, HRAlliance is a management
consulting organization specializing in employment retention and operational
development.
E-recruiting remains as an important tool linking
recruiters and employers with potential employees; however, e-recruiting's
role in the big picture is evolving, according to Mark Howard, account
manager with Management Recruiters of Berkeley, Berkeley, Calif.
"What I'm finding is that there has obviously
been a large drain of talent back into the marketplace because of
layoffs and folding companies," Howard says. "Recruiting
has gone back to the basics. We are back to sourcing candidates through
traditional means--networking through contacts, on the telephone,
in person-to identify quality people."
E-recruiting for research
Whereas e-recruiting was a huge hit last year
because of all the activity, it hasn't worked as well as the marketplace
has shifted, Sommers says and, as a result, the Internet has evolved
into more of a research tool for candidates, employers and recruiters.
Sophisticated users today use e-recruiting as a way to broaden their
networking, according to Sommers. "I've got to use this as a
sophisticated and important research tool in order to get the type
of leads, connections and people to talk to that I need for my job
search."
Howard thinks e-recruiting has lost footing
in areas in which there are oversupplies of workers because most employers
need only a few jobs filled and are looking for specific skills. The
problem is that with the oversupply and anxious workers the responses
from e-recruiting can be overwhelming and time-consuming for recruiters
and employers, who have to sift through all the resumes. Howard admits,
however, e-recruiting plays an important role in linking recruiters
and employers with candidates they otherwise wouldn't have known existed.
That's true especially in areas such as health care, where there are
widespread worker shortages.
The e-recruiting evolution
Experts say as recruiting becomes more targeted
to fill fewer vacancies, e-recruiting must become more precise. According
to Sommers, the Internet as a whole is taking on a more sophisticated
role in recruiting. Research on the Web is becoming more highly developed
as professional "sourcers" gather information for employers
about sources of employees on the Internet. According to Sommers,
USENET, a worldwide bulletin board system featuring thousands of forums
or newsgroups, is a great research tool.
Sommers and Howard cite specialty job boards
that are regional and cover specific industries as being a move in
the right direction. "But the bottom line is a job board is only
as good as the quality of people that view it," Howard says.
Howard says that e-recruiting will have to
reach out and touch active and passive job seekers, perhaps by using
more traditional methods, such as direct marketing. Personalizing
the e-experience will also become more important as the job market
evolves.
According to Howard, health care is a unique
area in which nurses and others who are in high demand are often too
busy to post on several job boards or look through the available jobs.
Job boards that respond by e-mailing nurses jobs that fit their specific
needs might solve the problem. It's all toward making it a more personalized
e-experience, Howard says. "I think the fact is that e-recruiting
needs to become more personalized, more one-on-one, more targeted.
As a job seeker, if I were a nurse, I don't want to hear about opportunities
that I'm not qualified to do or spend my time reading through those."
Frank. Heasley, PhD, CEO and president of MedZilla,
Inc., agrees with the concept of personalization. Dr. Heasley established
Edmonds, Wash.-based Medzilla in 1994. MedZilla is the original Internet
site to serve professionals and employers in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals,
medicine and science.
"Job boards per se are more successful based on how personally
they can serve their candidates and clients. The more human energy
you can bring through the system, the better it works because the
Internet is actually a very personal medium--it's just that it happens
through computers and a lot of the people who deal with computers
tend to be fairly impersonal people. If the personality of the site
comes through, the chances are that it will work better for people
because they'll relate to it better," he says.
However, Dr. Heasley also says, the basic premise
of the job board remains as a vehicle to lower barriers between employers
and candidates. "The recruiter's function is to go out and find
people who are perhaps not looking for jobs, interview them and select
the very tip-top of the group to present them to his client. That's
not the way a job board works. That's not our primary function,"
he says. "The value that job boards provide is to more easily
bring employers and candidates in contact with each other. It is to
provide that first level of contact and interest and do it in a way
that is more efficient and requires less energy, is less expensive
and is more precise."
MedZilla, Dr. Heasley says, plays a role in
capturing both active and passive candidates. "In very general
terms, 'passive' candidates tend to post resumes and have job agents
which notify them about new positions that match their needs. That
conserves their time, and requires the least effort on their part.
'Active' candidates tend to dig for and apply to job advertisements,
proactively find recruiters and mail their resumes to them and to
employers."
All agree that the role of e-recruiting, whether
used as a research tool or a means to actively post for jobs, continues
to have a place in finding the right person for the job-regardless
of demand. The reasons people will turn to e-recruiting and the degree
to which it will be used in this topsy-turvy job market in the coming
year is yet to be seen.
