E-recruiting has gone from a hot but unproven recruiting approach to an integral, measurable part of the recruiter''s toolbox, says David Manaster, president, Electronic Recruiting Exchange. Using the Internet has become a fundamental part of recruiting. It''s difficult to do without it, he says.
According to Manaster, the hype which obscured e-recruiting''s real value is gone and has been replaced by the realization among employers, recruiters and candidates that e-recruiting is here to stay. E-recruiting has become less of an ''e'' and more of a recruiting practice, Manaster says. Now, candidates in addition to looking in their newspapers for jobs, the first thing they do is go on line and check for them there. So, one of the first things employers do is they''ll go on line and post their jobs on the Internet.
Manaster is right, judging by statistics. Eighty-eight percent of HR professionals use Internet job postings to find job candidates and 96% of job seekers use them to find jobs, according to the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM)/CareerJournal Search Tactics Poll (2001).
While more HR dollars continue to go to newspaper advertising, Manaster says, the volume of jobs on the Internet is higher. There are definitely more jobs on the Internet than there are in newspapers. Particularly if you look at individual home pages--a company will post all the jobs they have online and might advertise a smaller proportion in print, he says.
Manaster says that everyone in recruiting has had a difficult year. Job boards are chasing fewer companies that have smaller budgets. However, the larger job boards haven''t seen the 30% drop in volume that some newspapers have.
That certainly fits with our experience. Last year was our largest year ever, and this year promises to be another blockbuster. Which is even more remarkable when you consider that we don''t even have a sales force., says Frank Heasley, PhD, president and CEO of MedZilla, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community of jobseekers and HR Professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science.
Still shaking out
Reviews on the effectiveness of internet job postings are mixed in the general recruiting market, with 58% of HR professionals saying they thought Internet postings are an effective search tactic and 48% of job seekers said the same, according to SHRM.
The niche area of healthcare, however, might be different. Cathy Allman, Executive director, National Association for Healthcare Recruitment (NAHCR) says her organization sent out a survey asking member hospitals what they thought worked best in recruiting and Internet job postings were first and second (home pages, followed by listings on job boards) on the list. The NAHCR survey, published in December 2001, represents the responses of about 315 hospital in-house recruiters in the United States.
Still, 97% of the respondents reported using newspaper advertising. The most traditional ways are not as effective anymore. I think it''s how the world in general has changed. Everybody is into electronics Ö. And I think another thing is that local newspaper advertising can be very expensive and probably recruiters and human resources departments need to look at what''s most effective and use that rather than what is the most expensive but only the third or fourth most effective, she says.
According to Manaster, statistics indicate that the niche boards are far more effective than the mega-job boards. From the very start, we have focused exclusively in the fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science. It''s impossible to be all things to all people. Our success is based on staying within our focus, and providing excellence in just the fields we serve. says Dr. Heasley.
Have a plan
Manaster says that e-recruiting has become a sophisticated tool, requiring the research and planning that goes into budgeting for newspaper and other recruitment advertising. The results are much more effective when you measure-otherwise, he says, you don''t know what''s really working.
Used wisely, the internet can be the most powerful ally that a recruiter can have. The key lies in realizing that above a certain level, the value of any database diminishes as it grows larger. Trying to find that one candidate in a mass of unrelated resumes is generally not productive. The most valuable database would contain just one candidate: the one you are seeking to hire. says Dr. Heasley.
E-recruiting is Alive, Well and Established
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