A Telescopic View of On-Line Recruitment
By Mark Anderson, Director of Business Development
In many ways, it seems as though we have always had the Internet. Even for most of those who swore they would never get caught up in it, the memories of going to the study to grab an encyclopedia for a quick research question are distant. Everywhere you look and every thing you see is highlighting some sort of Website address. Virtually every aspect of life is being driven to one Internet destination or another. Whether you are ordering food, looking for a good book, banking, or buying insurance, everything can be done from the comfort of home via the World Wide Web. It is certainly no secret that people have been and are continuing to flock to the Internet by the droves. According to Pew Internet, 70% of the U.S. population is now on line, 50% of which have high-speed Internet access.
What does this mean to on-line recruitment? It means that you can get your job advertisement recruitment message in front of qualified potential candidates faster and easier than ever before. There are various ways of accomplishing this objective.
The first and most obvious way to use the Internet as a recruitment vehicle, is to make sure that you have an effective job board strategy in place. Job Boards such as Monster, HotJobs, and CareerBuilder along with niche and local sites are still and will continue to be the primary on line recruitment vehicle for most positions. With focus and singularity of purpose, job boards provide the most inexpensive method of getting your jobs in front of "job seekers ."
Before leaping out of the box to launch an assault on the passive candidates, it is important that an effective job board strategy first be employed. However, while job boards are the best vehicle for reaching "job seekers ," they are not going to help reach those ideal qualified people who are the perfect candidates, but are gainfully and happily employed. Loyal, hardworking, effective people often have great job security and don't have the time or the desire to browse job boards.
Attracting these types of people is where it takes the same creativity and targeted profiling that have been used by corporate giants in America for years in marketing their products or services to potential customers. There are various methods for utilizing the Internet to reach potential candidates: targeted email campaigns, buttons, banners, tiles, skyscrapers, "pop-unders ," etc., and those are just the basics. A great thing about the Internet, is that as it has developed and grown in functionality and popularity, so has the sophistication of the tracking and profiling capabilities used by the various Websites. What this allows for, is getting your message in front of only the candidates you are wanting to target.
There are various techniques for establishing exactly what that profile is, but a few have proven to be more effective than others. One of the best of these techniques, is through the construction of profiles based on the most successful individuals within your organization. This is far from a new concept, but exactly what type of profile you are building is very important. For the targeted reach that the Internet can provide, it is important that you talk extensively to your "A players" as to how they use the Internet. Are they all utilizing on-line banking services? Do they all regularly visit Weather.com? Are they playing games on-line? Do they check their stocks on a particular site? Do they tune in daily to Dilbert.com for the cartoon of the day? You might be surprised.
By determining where and when your top performers are spending their "on-line time," along with how often they frequent these destinations, you can start crafting your strategy for reaching out to individuals who share this profile.
The Internet is not a fad. It is here and it is here to stay. The challenge is in how you harness the full capabilities of the web to get your message in front of your target audience, in this case, potential employment candidates. While print is still a viable marketing outlet in some cases, it is quickly becoming to advertising what the Encyclopedia has become to research. As the markets rebound and hiring growth returns to normal levels, it will become increasingly important to have a strategy in place to reach out to both active "job seekers" and passive ideal candidates. The good news is that thanks to the reach made possible by the Internet, you can now get your job advertisement recruitment message in front of qualified potential candidates faster and easier than ever before.
Biography: Mark Anderson is part of TruStar Solutions' Executive Team as the Director of Business Solutions. Mark spearheads all of TruStar Solutions' sales efforts and is responsible for leading the consultative sales force in growing business. He does this by developing innovative training for the National Account Executives, lending support to corporate product marketing efforts, initiating customer relationship management programs, and analyzing market segments to set sales quotas and provide accurate forecasting figures on quarterly reports.
Mark has over 8 years of business experience in the area of sales, sales management, and consulting. Prior to joining TruStar Solutions Mark worked in the financial industry for organizations including Home Gold Financial and Bank One Corporation. Most recently Mark was an Account Executive with Lucent Technologies before coming on board with TruStar Solutions as a National Account Executive in 2001.
Mark has been a featured writer for various industry publications on the topics of Human Capital and Sales Strategy. He received his Bachelor of Science from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN.
