Recruitment is frozen in pre-web times

Recruitment is the most weakly supported enterprise process
Much of today's recruitment is frozen in pre-web times with companies failing to exploit technology solutions that allow them to build and exploit Talent Communities, according to StepStone, online recruitment specialists. Furthermore, recruitment processes are weakly supported by technology, and hence are often poorly planned, managed and measured.

Online recruitment is still viewed primarily as a media alternative to print - simply a cheaper way of advertising job vacancies. However, the real power of Internet technology is that it allows organisations to take a proactive approach to recruitment: to build candidate databases, to search, short-list and pre-qualify candidate capabilities and to actively build talent relationships. Although many companies already have private job sites, many of these do not even allow online applications or candidate registration, a reminder of some early
e-commerce sites that resorted to the fax machine.

Sadly, the majority of recruiters using online recruitment today still prefer to advertise a job and hope for the right response, said John Spiers, Chief Marketing Officer for StepStone ASA. Yet in an economic downturn, finding the right candidates can become even harder. In fact, recruiters are flooded with many candidates applying for jobs that are inappropriate to their skill set, whilst the best candidates stop looking to move, making the recruiter's job much more time consuming. Recruiters should be taking advantage of technology solutions to take direct control of candidate sourcing, avoiding the high costs of attracting candidates tactically through advertising or agencies.

The principles of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are starting to be applied to relationships with Talent, a company's potential employees. Targeted candidate marketing campaigns are used to attract candidates to a company's Talent Community and to educate and inform potential recruits. The talent community then provides the ripe pool of candidates from which to draw as specific recruitment needs arise. Automatic searching and matching technology can be used to short list candidates against a job profile, and these can feed directly into the recruiting process. At the same time, this process can be automated ERP-style to improve the efficiency, speed and effectiveness of both the candidate interaction and the internal process.

The benefits of this approach are many-fold. Organisations can take a long term view of their strategic hiring needs, added Spiers. With knowledge of conversion rates, they can calculate the volume and skills required in their talent community to fuel future recruiting. Companies can use their brand to attract candidates to the community and enhance their brand values through a professional relationship with potential recruits. Campaigns can target the required skills and profiles ahead of hiring needs.

Leading employers are starting to apply the same principles to internal hiring. By facilitating an internal job market, staff can be encouraged to progress their careers within an organisation, rather than outside. The internal talent community is particularly valuable at a time of staff reductions where organisations typically find themselves having to replace staff lost through natural attrition, whilst laying off employees in another area. An avoided redundancy is the cheapest hire there can be, turning a significant expense into a no-cost hire.

StepStone is addressing these challenges by bringing leading Talent Management solutions from Hire.com to the European market. StepStone's strategy delivers localised products with local support and market expertise, to provide European employers with state of the art recruitment solutions.

Recruitment is the most weakly supported and measured enterprise process, added Spiers. Yet it is critical to any business's success. But improving the process on its own without fuelling it through a proactive approach to talent Management is akin to buying a razor with no blade. Our solutions allow recruiters to take control not just of the process but also the relationships with potential candidates through the Talent Management approach.