moon 2007-3-6 11:31 AM
Staffing Executives: Send this to your boss
The world of job recruiting is changing at an ever faster clip. What are you and your company doing keep up? In this first installment of a new weekly series, we’ll take a look at the factors causing a seismic change in the recruitment process.
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As baby-boomers begin to leave the workforce and members of Generation Y, Z and beyond begin to fill those vacancies, the pools of talent from which employers draw is changing drastically. Couple those changes with an increasingly globalized economy, and the effective shrinking of the world that entails, and that talent pool seemd even more fragmented. Why, then, do recruiters and HR departments insist on exclusively using traditional hiring methods for finding candidates? Today’s talent prospects are increasingly dependent on smooth-functioning, user-populated online environments.
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Now, in the dawn of Web 2.0, there should be a paradigm shift for hiring. Welcome to Recruitment 2.0.mX2k af6U:kt"xz rj
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In their book, Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the human Side of Business, Rusty Rueff and itzBig’s Hank Stringer argue that many companies’ web environment is not “sticky” enough to successfully capture talent prospects. They explain that companies need to ask:
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[i]What happens when potential talent submits a resume on your careers site? Giving you the benefit of the doubt, we will assume your system automatically e-mails the person an acknowledgement. This e-mail is the first direct communication your company has with that talent. Does it say,’Welcome to our talent community?’ Or does it say, ‘We will call you if something comes up?’”[/i] h Z)M0jv
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In other words, are talented individuals being sufficiently engaged during those early hiring phases?
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In a post on interactive media blog EXCELER8ion, bloggers Julian and Shannon Seery Gude argue that “companies [need to] harness social networking features and collaboration tools such as blogs and wikis to allow employees to connect and collaborate with one another.” They go on to explain that
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Such an evolution could easily replace flat “corporate” directories and also work as a way to further transparency and by giving the outside world the ability to become members of the network (i.e. job seekers…and I guess recruiters as well for that matter) with corresponding levels of access to feeds of “public” information (read the full article here).
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[i]Again, according to Stringer and Rueff, “as many as 98 percent of visitors to that [submit resume] page ‘back out’ without submitting anything” because that area of a corporate website fails to actively engage a prospect; it fails to “capture the relationship.” Instead, they recommend “attracting and communicating with talent online” by utilizing interactive technology and responding to the communication from talent. However, that component of Web 2.0 interactivity should be coupled with the anonymity most social media users also enjoy. Don’t solicit their phone numbers or other personal information in the early hiring stages. Instead, wait for the talent to offer that information and then employers can follow up on it. Many job seekers with social media savvy are skeptical of online solicitation, even from potential employers, and, as the blog Employment Digest points out, they have a right to be so.[/i]-~e k4|
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In a survey of 100 executive recruiters in June, 77 percent said they use search engines to learn more about candidates before extending an interview, according to ExecuNet, an executive job search and recruiting network. Of those recruiters, 35 percent said they have passed on applicants because of material they find online. (from Employment Digest).4t:E_!^py2`$Wn(` b4^ r
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These new notions of recruitment are just now beginning to see some widespread usage among companies.:PlZdD {D-Eq1p
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If you are a staffing executive who has begun to sense that things are rapidly changing, give some thought to how online social environments are changing the rules for job recruiting. If you’d like to get ahead of all these changes, check back every week for a new installment in this series, and send everyone of these posts to your boss.