Internet recruitment deconstructed - 03/2001

totaljobs.com morning seminars which have been held throughout March assemble e-recruitment experts and employer case studies to provide a forum for discussion and information exchange on the use of the Internet for recruiting.

Keith Robinson, customer relationship management director of totaljobs.com, acknowledged that employers had a number of concerns over e-recruitment including confusion over the variety of offerings, doubts over the profile of the web job-seeker, inability to track results and fear of technology which requires too much change too fast. Putting the e-recruitment market into perspective, the job board market was worth around 80 million last year compared with a hard copy recruitment advertising market worth some 1.4 billion. Hard copy recruitment media is a very mature market with clear positioning and media tend to be selected based on what has always been done - 'nobody ever got sacked for placing an ad in The Sunday Times.'

With Internet access amongst UK adults now around 20 million and research showing that 51% of these have looked for jobs on the Internet, Robinson argued that the Internet has arrived as a job-seeking medium across the population, not just IT and graduates. And with advertising on the Internet over 5 times cheaper than a newspaper and 12 times cheaper than using a recruitment consultancy, the argument for e-recruitment is compelling.

Andy Weight, managing director of online advertising agency Catchitinthe.net, explained how online recruitment media planning should be approached with the same attention to facts as traditional media planning - visitor numbers and visitor profile. An online advertisement needs to be treated with the same care as press copy. Key is to think like the job-seeker. Job title, essential skills and job summary can be critical to making the match between job description and job applicant. Job boards can help employers in understanding how their search engines work in terms of how results are ranked and how certain key words can determine search results.

For best results, Andy Weight recommended using a mix of generalist job boards such as totaljobs.com and niche sites. One advantage of the Internet is that job advertisements can be changed in real time depending on response levels and the type of response. Because of the immediacy of the Internet, candidates' expectations in terms of response are much higher than in the offline world. Once replies begin to come in, a recruiter needs to respond to candidates quickly and get immediate buy-in to the recruitment process.

www.totaljobs.com