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IN THIS ISSUE
Newsletter Sponsors
A Note from the Editor
Special Trials and Discounts For Members
Today's Recruiting News Headlines
Featured Recruiting Jobs
Polls and Trends
Weekly Tip: Methods of Careers Site Feedback
Recruiting Bookmarks
Upcoming Conferences
Site Of The Week - NicheBoards.com
Final Note
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Newsletter Sponsors

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A Note From The Editor

CareerXroads.com has compiled some end of the year awards. Need a good chuckle check them out with the link below.

YEAR END AWARDS: A couple "rants" to lighten up the holiday season

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Special Trials And Discounts For Members

Below is a list of trials and discounts that companies have extended to our members. If you are interested in offering a promotion/discount to our members, please contact us.

1. JedaSystems - Free Demo!

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Today's Recruiting News Headlines
Today's recruiting and HR headlines can be viewed at www.recruitersnetwork.com/dailynews.htm.

• New study refutes e-mail myth at workplace - thestar.com
• Managing A Mature Work Force - Washington Post
• Economy to Improve but Few New Jobs - Reuters

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Featured Recruiting Jobs

This section highlights several recruiting related positions recently posted on JobsinRecruiting.com. To view all jobs or to register a career agent visit www.jobsinrecruiting.com.

• Recruiter - HW HealthFinders
• Account Executive - MRI/Sales Consultants
• HR Recruiter/Generalist (2 positions) - The Pennmor Group

Looking to recruit recruiting professionals? Post your jobs on JobsinRecruiting.com.

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Polls and Trends

View and participate in this month's poll at
http://www.recruitersnetwork.com/poll/.

• The ability for candidates to reuse their information for multiple applications has increased among the Fortune 500

Trend Watch is sponsored and provided by iLogos, a division of Recruitsoft. Click here for a complete archive.

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Methods of Careers Site Feedback
By Alice Snell

The corporate Careers website has been the keystone in the staffing strategy of many large, Fortune 500 companies. Recruiters are finding the Careers website to be a significant source of candidates. Best practices for attracting, convincing and capturing candidates are becoming widely adopted. The focus for many companies has moved to improving and optimizing the Careers website, within current resources. Like any project, efforts towards optimization of the Careers website must be made with informed decisions based on objective data. One valuable source of data for improving a Careers site is getting feedback from the candidates themselves.

Gathering candidate feedback can alert you to basic problems and issues, or it can help quantify what your candidates actually think about the Careers site. These are two distinct functions, calling for two different approaches. On the one hand, it is a relatively simple matter to allow those candidates who have experienced a problem on your site to let you know about it. However, if you would like answers to questions concerning candidates’ likes and dislikes about the Careers site, their informational needs, or related topics, a more careful approach using good survey design and sampling methods is required.

Feedback Mechanisms

The simplest form of candidate feedback mechanism is an email link. Email links on Careers websites often attract unsolicited resumes by attachment, so companies typically include a request not to send resumes to the feedback email address. Measures such as these will not prevent some candidates from using the email link to ask if a particular position is still open, whether the candidate’s resume was received, or other general recruiting inquiries. Though easiest to implement, an email link on the Careers website for candidate feedback is the least efficient. Analyzing and quantifying feedback received by email is laboriously slow, since each email must be read and classified according to the type of feedback.

The feedback mechanism on a Careers website may be a simple “suggestion-box” Web form. Comments typed into a Web form typically are delivered to the email inbox of someone within the company, so in this regard a comment form is no more efficient than an email link. A Web form, though, can include a drop-down menu with which the candidate selects from a pre-set list of feedback issues as a way of labeling or summarizing comments. Guiding candidates to limit their feedback to one of a list of predefined topics helps them to understand and follow the intentions of the feedback mechanism. The comments come pre-categorized, which removes from the corporation some of the burden of having to read and interpret the comments, in order to classify them. However, the actual comments themselves require interpretation, which slows down the process.

Closed-Ended vs. Open-Ended

An improvement upon a simple online suggestion-box is to provide candidates with a feedback mechanism in which the topics and possible responses are in large part pre-determined. A question with the set of possible answers predefined is known as “closed-ended.” Closed-ended questions include multiple-choice or yes/no responses, and answers on a numerical scale (e.g. 1 = not at all important; 5 = extremely important). An “open-ended” question, by contrast, is one for which the respondent writes his or her answer in text. Closed-ended questions are much easier to summarize than open-ended questions, and in the end are more useful for making decisions.

Open-ended questions do have their uses, especially when the full list of possible answers to a question is not known. It is a good practice to allow respondents to answer an otherwise closed-ended question with the open-ended “Other, Specify”. Open-ended questions also work well for ensuring that your survey captures all of the relevant issues, as in “Is there anything else you would like to tell us about our Careers site?” Never make open-ended questions mandatory. Although open-ended questions can elicit some important insight, they also require a lot of time and effort on the part of the respondent.

What’s Working

iLogos Research has found that just under ten percent of Fortune 500 companies currently provide candidates on the Careers website with some sort of feedback mechanism. Through feedback, you may uncover unforeseen technical problems, unclear navigation or instructions, or unintuitive interface design. Gathering candidate feedback should go hand-in-hand with other forms of Careers site monitoring, such as measuring traffic flow patterns. By soliciting candidate feedback, you can gain valuable insights into what is working and what is not on the Careers website, from its most important users.

About the Author

Alice Snell (asnell@ilogos.com) is Vice President of iLogos Research, which analyzes best practices and innovative staffing management technologies to provide intelligence, strategies, financial models and results-based consulting for large corporations, to optimize the assignment of human capital assets. As a leading industry analyst, Ms. Snell has authored numerous articles and reports on recruiting technology and staffing management issues including Trends in Fortune 500 Careers Web Site Recruiting; Best Practices for European 500 Career Web Site Recruiting; Perception vs. Reality: Jobseeker Behavior Online; Best Practices for Fortune 500 Career Web Site Recruiting; and Global 500 Web Site Recruiting Surveys. Ms. Snell has been frequently called upon to provide expert commentary and analysis regarding online recruiting issues and is quoted in leading media including The Boston Globe, Chief Executive, The New York Times, PC Week, IT Recruiter, Chicago Tribune, and CNBC.com. iLogos is the independent research and consulting division of Recruitsoft. Recruitsoft (www.recruitsoft.com) powers enterprise-wide staffing management for Global 1000 organizations.

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Recruiting Bookmarks

Recruiting/HR Reports and Research

• wetfeet.com
• erexchange ATS Report
• ilogos.com
• vault.com 

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Upcoming Seminars & Conferences

Click here for schedules for upcoming conferences and seminars.

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Site Of The Week - NicheBoards.com

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Final Note

There are only 13 shopping days left before Christmas.

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