E-recruiting: The Internet changes the rules in the competition for best people For recruiters caught in the unforgiving competition for the best people, the Internet offers compelling capabilities. It's faster, less costly and reaches millions. Realizing the remarkable potential of the Internet as a recruiting tool does not, fortunately, require wholesale changes in the technology systems and business processes most Human Resource practitioners use today.

Winning the future
It's no secret to most senior executives that the viability of their organizations is directly related to its success in winning the competition for the best people. The need to identify, attract and keep the highest calibre employees is an issue that has moved, in winning organizations, from the confines of the HR Department to the executive suite. Recruiting is becoming a core strategic priority for these organizations.

This developing emphasis on recruiting is propelling HR practitioners to the strategic centre of future-oriented private and public-sector organizations. The significant role Human Resource specialists must now play in ensuring organizational success requires that they become highly strategic in the fundamental element in the competition for best people -- recruiting.

E-recruiting: recruiting morphs
In the complex matrix of Human Resource management, recruiting remains a fundamental need. In fact, driven by relentless demographic pressures -- higher replacement rates in a shrinking talent pool -- recruiting is under more pressure than ever.

What's more, compounding their shrinking availability and growing strategic importance, high-potential job seekers have new technological tools that have shifted the 'balance of power' in the recruiting process in their favour. The Internet and electronic recruiting -- or e-recruiting -- has put job seekers in the driver's seat.

The star employees of tomorrow are using the Internet -- at dizzying and exponentially advancing rates -- to do much more than job hunt. They are career hunting. They use the world wide web, Usenet News groups, chat rooms and email not merely to look for posted job opportunities. They can -- and do -- research and 'qualify' potential employers before responding to job opportunities, whether those come to their attention via the Internet or in more traditional ways.

These 'best-of-the-best,' potential employees are emerging from universities, colleges and technical institutes with a calm understanding of their own value in the marketplace and they are 'Internet-ized' -- they are comfortable with the e-tools which have resolutely changed the rules for human inter-action and communication. In fact, they use the Internet with the unconscious confidence with which their parents use the telephone.

For tomorrow's CEO, the Internet has become an extension of self -- a basic means of communication with anyone and everyone of real significance to them.

Why are newspapers, magazines, journals and even TV networks rushing online? Because even these info-competitors to the Internet realize that the next generation of their readers or viewers gather in cyberspace: to reach tomorrow's leaders, they, too, must be where those high-rev individuals are increasingly found.

This lesson is not lost on cutting edge recruiting professionals. Employers of choice understand that recruiting is morphing and, while traditional ways of reaching out to potential super-star employees remain valid, more and more, electronic recruiting -- using the Internet in the search for candidates -- is an essential aspect of the competition for employees of choice.

E-recruiting arrives
Recruiting online has arrived with breathtaking speed.

As recently as the mid-1990s, job postings on the Internet in Canada were few and far between. The Internet was perhaps considered by those organizations at the bleeding edge of technology as a supplement to traditional recruiting. They may have used "join us' hot links on corporate web sites to post jobs. The truly advanced may have used email to gather resumes.

In the main, however, most organizations relied on tried and true recruiting methods. They relied on newspaper job advertising with "only qualified candidates will be contacted" caveats and resume gathering via phone, fax or mail. It worked.

Behind the scenes, though, the Internet was gathering steam. Personal computer use and Internet penetration rates skyrocketed during the last half of the 1990s. In response, organizational use of the World Wide Web to market, sell product or merely establish an Internet presence, grew at dramatic rates too.

In Canada by 1998 -- as Y2K hype was cranking up -- a growing host of companies was using the World Wide Web to advertise job openings. Globally, a growing list of online job boards had sprung up. Exponential growth in e-recruiting was happening.

By the close of 2000, Internet recruiting was a fact of life for many corporations. Because growth rates are explosive, the reach of electronic recruiting in Canada is difficult to quantify. It won't hold still long enough to be measured. However, the impact of e-recruiting and its potential can be illustrated by the emergence of workopolis.com, the country's biggest Internet job site. Workopolis is a collaborative effort of two of the most determined competitors in Canadian corporate history - the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star newspapers. The fact of their collaboration demonstrates the need these historic rivals feel to be part of the future of HR -- e-recruiting.

From the job seeker's point of view, the value of the Internet is established. According to workopolis.com, for example, the number of queries from job hunters exploded upwards, from half a million in January, 2000 to almost 4.5 million by July.

For recruiters, the value of the Internet is emerging too.

The wins for e-recruiters
The Internet is an ideal mechanism for recruiting. If it had been designed solely for the purpose of recruiting, the Internet could hardly be improved.

From the recruiter's perspective, the Internet is:

ubiquitous

global - unhampered by geographic limitations

linear - it reaches the target audience

simple - in terms of the resources needed to manage recruiting

inexpensive - in comparison to traditional recruiting

fast - jobs can be instantly posed, resumes can be forwarded instantly on receipt.

For electronic recruiters, the Internet offers a host of very compelling advantages:

1. The reach for electronic job posting numbers in the millions at any given moment.

2. E-applicants tend to be better educated, technologically skilled and career focused.

3. Job seekers use the Internet pro-actively. (They may be looking at you before you reach out to them.)

4. Posting jobs electronically is substantially cheaper than print advertising. In some cases the cost can be 10% -- or less - of traditional newspaper job ads.

5. E-mail capability enables instant response and quick capture of superior job applicants.

6. Because paper and work flows are dramatically reduced, the resource cost to HR departments in managing searches is significantly reduced.

7. Software can be customized -- or purchased -- to mesh with existing back office

IT systems to build and enrich resume banks and databases.

While, again, no hard statistics are available, anecdotal evidence would suggest that a growing number of Canadian companies are using the Internet as an adjunct to their overall recruiting programs. In the high-tech sector that number is higher. Where better to look for technologically capable employees than the Internet?

In fact, some of the dot.com companies use the Internet exclusively for recruiting. They don't want to waste time processing resumes from anyone who isn't completely Internet-abled.

Electronic recruiting: the challenges
While it represented a significant improvement over paper, first-generation electronic recruiting instruments tended to be bulky, complex, expensive and high-maintenance. Fundamentally, the tools were databases and database management instruments which:

were expensive to build or buy off the shelf

required disruptive 'installation' by the vendor

required complex configuration to effectively automate resume gathering, sorting and prioritizing

required a lot of tweaking to work with existing departmental IT systems and information management tools

required training for users

were unwieldy in use

required software bridges to interface with the Internet

were insecure -- a significant concern re privacy of personal information

were vulnerable to virus attacks

were limited in their abilities to parse resumes to ensure that completely unsuited candidates were weeded out before submission to their 'client.'

Fortunately, vastly improved second-generation e-recruiting tools are becoming widely available which operate much more like e-com than Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). They are:

non-resident
The software exists on the providers' servers, not on departmental hard drives. As a result, it requires no installation or configuration.

browser-driven
The interface is simple, requires little or no specialized training and submits data in the universally-translatable HTML format. Accordingly, there is no need for additional software bridges to the Internet, no paper-trail to 'manage' the management software, nor is complex re-working of data required to fit most departmental databases.

much less costly
Because of its smaller footprint, browser-driven e-recruitment software is much less expensive to own, lease or maintain.

user-friendly and capable
Its browser format allows job seekers to more easily submit resumes and personal information.

secure
128-bit web browser encryption has answered many security concerns and greatly-improved firewalls and anti-virus capability makes current software much less vulnerable to information theft, hackers or virus attacks.

more manageable
resume management is easier with second-generation tools. They permit more sophisticated front-end establishment of resume criteria and they enable simpler resume prioritizing

instantly responsive
browser-enabled email functionality permits organizations conducting web-enabled searches to be immediately notified when a resume flows in which sets off green flags for fast response.

The last hurdle
If one stumbling block remains for electronic recruitment it is attitudinal. The reverse side of the growing penetration rate for Internet-enabled corporate recruiting in Canada is the much larger per cent of organizations which are not yet utilizing the compelling advantages of the Internet to meet recruiting needs.

In many cases, hesitancy is a function of reticence. The cost and limitations of first-generation tools created scepticism among many HR practitioners that the investment would yield much return. This may be compounded by comfort with existing processes, established relationships with local media or HR service providers, and by unwillingness to change IT systems that are doing the job. If it ain't broke . . .

The downside in these attitudes may not be obvious. It's hard to measure something you don't have. However, the missed-opportunity cost to the organization may be significant anyway. If your competitors are using all the available tools in the battle for the best people while you're not, they may be winning.

It's the future
Electronic recruiting is the way of the future. The advantages, from highly ramped-up effectiveness to significant cost reduction, so far outweigh the comforts of the status quo that e-recruiting will inevitably be used more and more to power the search for best people which drives HR strategies for winning organizations.

In its early stages, electronic recruitment -- like many technologically driven, new business processes -- encountered some scepticism. For some HR managers, it was difficult to envisage a lot of near-term return on the time, talent and revenue investments required to implement electronic recuritment solutions. Visionaries looking beyond the hurdles, however, foresaw the potential of electronic recruiting and anticipated quick resolution of first-generation technological limitations in the instruments for electronic recruiting.

Those early adopters have realized significant benefits to their departments, HR practices and the quality of people they are bringing into their organizations. In the more advanced e-recruitment milieu of the US, electronic recruitment advocates link dramatic productivity gains for some organizations to their adoption of electronic recruiting.

In Canada, making those linkages is premature. What is not at issue, though, is that the Internet is changing the rules in HR practice. There is no question of the growing momentum for Internet enabled recruiting.

In the few short years that Canadian HR practitioners have utilized e-recruiting, the payback has been such that the emergence of electronic recruiting as a core HR competency is certain. It's a matter of when, not if, electronic recruiting becomes a key differentiator in the relentless competition for the best people.