Management Committment the most important factor

Enhance Media have conducted a Benchmarking Study on behalf of IQPC Exchange for the third consecutive year. 2003's Benchmarking study was conducted at The European Human Capital Exchange on 26th and 27th February. The Benchmarking study aims to assess online recruitment usage levels and provides HR professionals the chance to compare their activities with those of their peers across a series of key HR issues. As this is the third year that the study has been carried out we are also able to identify useful trends.

The number of job boards HR professionals are advertising with has decreased slightly from last year. This year's Benchmarking study shows that employers are currently advertising on an average of 2.8 job boards. This is down from an average of 3.5 in 2002, but still up from the average of 2.5 in 2001. Despite this seeming decrease in online recruitment advertising, 68% of those questioned thought that their online recruitment activity would increase in the next 12 months.

In the last two years the Benchmarking Study has identified the importance of the corporate recruitment site as a method of generating quality candidates, so this year's study included a new question on the providers of corporate recruitment sites - aiming to identify who supplies the recruitment element of corporate websites. The survey showed that 67% of respondents had developed their recruitment website internally, 14% have the site hosted by an ASP owner and 19% didn't have a recruitment element to their site or didn't know who the provider was.

For the last two years HR professionals have identified the integration of backend candidate management technologies as being the most important issue facing online recruitment. However, there was a major change this year with 38% identifying improving the quality of candidates as being the most important issue, followed by data protection with 24%, employer branding issues with 19% and then backend technology with 14%. This may suggest that a large number of employers have selected candidate management systems in the last two years and are making progress with the integration of backend technology.

This year's study also addressed work / life balance issues. 81% of those sampled said that their organisation had taken steps to address work / life balance issues. We then went on to ask which measures organisations had introduced to tackle work / life balance issues; 82% of those sampled had introduced flexible working hours, 64% home working, 59% time off in lieu, 50% job sharing, 41% gym membership, 32% had increased maternity or paternity rights, 23% had allowed employees to construct bespoke benefits packages, 18% had introduced annualised hours and 5% an on site crche.
We also sought to identify the single most important factor when trying to achieve work / life balance for employees. 44% of the sample thought that commitment to work / life balance at management level was the most important factor, compared to 28% who felt that the right organisational culture was the most important factor and 11% who identified the establishment of the necessary IT systems as being the most important factor in achieving work / life balance.

The full results of the IQPC Exchange / Enhance Media 2003 Benchmarking study contain additional information regarding online recruitment, e-learning, work / life balance issues and compares results over the last three years. The results booklet will be available free of charge as a pdf within a couple of weeks. Please email iqpc@enhancemedia.co.uk to register to receive your copy.