Building Your Recruitment "Dream Home"
By Mark Anderson, Director of Business Development
http://www.recruitersnetwork.com/articles/article.cfm?ID=1363
Building a successful Internet Recruitment Strategy is much like building a custom home. It takes careful planning, the proper mix of supplies and labor, a well coordinated and thought out scheduling of components, and most importantly, it takes a good initial vision. Unfortunately, unlike a custom homebuilder, many corporations dive into their recruitment strategy with their attention focused on the final exterior of the home, or the features in the kitchen, etc. rather than keeping their attention on the big picture. To really understand what it takes to build the custom "dream home" recruitment strategy, one must first understand what are the various components that make up the final product.
The primary benefit of the Internet as a medium for recruitment is that it is fast, easy, and relatively inexpensive to generate candidates. The two questions then become "Where do I find the best candidates?" and "Then what?"
Below are 5 components that should be included in the blueprint for your successful "dream home" Internet recruitment strategy:
1. Candidate database: Depending upon your recruitment budget (which is often heavily under represented in Fortune 1000 companies), some type of private, searchable database is critical to a successful strategy. With a little research, one can find a suitable database regardless of how challenging your budget is. A $500,000 Applicant Tracking System, while very nice, is not necessary to be able to have a private, searchable candidate database. Solutions range from as high to as low as you can afford to pay depending on what functionality you can or can't live without.
2. Centralized recruitment: Too often companies keep recruitment as just another part of a Human Resource Generalist's duties. Unless the company is very small or has virtually no turnover, this approach will usually be a "strategy killer " and result in increased use of expensive 3rd party search firms. Ideally, a company would have dedicated recruiters broken out by functional area with a close working relationship with the hiring managers in those functional areas; an "in house " search firm so to speak. This will enable those recruiters to become specialists in their areas and thus be very effective.
3. Job Boards: Now that you have completed the "dirty work" and laid the foundation, it is time to frame the house. Since your private, searchable database is ready to start receiving candidates and your focused recruiters are ready to start screening resumes, it is time to generate your candidate pool. To do so effectively, one must really understand what roles they will be recruiting for and where. The first step is to identify the "foundational" board or boards for the strategy. This will guarantee an influx of candidates and will allow for the support of all kinds of positions throughout the organization. The next step is to identify key niche Internet job boards whose candidate profile is similar to that of your company workforce. For example, a large I.T. company's strategy may consist of two foundational boards, one or two I.T. specific boards, an executive recruitment site, and hopefully a diversity site or two. By incorporating the proper mix of general and niche sites into the strategy, you can ensure not only a large candidate pool, but a quality one as well.
4. Streamline sourcing solutions: In order to make an aggressive, multi-site strategy manageable, it is vital that the recruiters are given the tools to allow them to fully utilize the memberships. If a strategy includes 3+ job boards, and a manual posting and sourcing strategy is in place, the postings may appear on two of the boards, usually just one, but rarely on all three. Further, without single-interface Internet sourcing technology, recruiters will almost always migrate to their favorite job board database and use it exclusively. Sure, there are exceptions, but very few. It is important to provide the technology to enable the recruiters to post jobs to multiple job boards from a single interface and also to source resumes from a single interface.
5. Narrowing/Screening Technology: You have now built your home, time for the exterior "extras" that will make it stand out and give it the curbside appeal that you desire. With a steady stream of candidates pouring into your database; chances are, you have several candidates who are an excellent fit for your open job requisition. But how do you find them? Like candidate databases, there are a slew of solutions out there to help screen and narrow the candidate pool. Without this component, you risk severely limiting the number of job requisitions that can be effectively supported by your recruiters, not to mention the risk of "burn out" by those recruiters.
Before throwing your hands up in the air and settling for a few more years in your "track-builder home" , I would strongly suggest that you first step back and look at your blueprints. The difference between a successful Internet recruitment strategy and an unsuccessful one may just be a few subtle changes in your design specifications. Perhaps instead of cutting back on the budget, the answer may just be to slightly increase it. Or, again, it may just be a couple of tweaks. In any case, your "dream home " recruitment strategy may be a lot closer than you realize!
