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Enjoy an Illustrative Issue of the WEDDLE's Newsletter Recruiters Network Home | Subscribe Now! ________________________________________________________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS
_________________________________________________________________________ The
State of Cyberspace WEDDLE's
2001 Recruiter's Guide to Employment Web Sites has now been published, and
the data we collected offer a fascinating glimpse into the current state of
recruiting resources on the Internet. For
example, 23 of the sites we profiled in our 2000 Guide are no longer in
operation or so radically changed as to be, for all practical purposes, new
sites. That's about 7% of the total
population of 350 sites we covered, which is significantly less than the number
of retail stores that fail each year and hardly an affirmation that the much
ballyhooed shake out among recruitment sites is now underway. On the other hand, the 2001
Guide profiles 147 sites that did not appear in the 2000 Guide, either because
they were not then in existence or were not deemed worthy of coverage.
That's 42% of the total sites profiled, a pace of development that we
think signifies an industry at the peak of health.
Moreover, the updated information pro-vided by the other 58% of the sites
describes big advances in site traffic and capabilities. To add greater resolution to our assessment of the state of cyberspace, we studied a statistically valid sample of this year's profiled sites. Our findings follow: Of the sites in the sample population, 80% had a niche focus, while 20% were positioned as broad-gauged or general purpose recruiting resources. Within the niche sites, there were four areas of specialization:
As you might expect, the niche sites attracted a significantly lower level of traffic than did the general purpose sites.
We also looked at the job
posting and resume searching services offered by general purpose and niche sites
and again found some important differences. Job
Posting Pricing.
Bottom line.
Niche sites can be great bargains, but practice good consumerism and be
selective. Discounts.
Bottom line. You can cut your cost of using general purpose sites if you shop smart. Limitations.
Bottom line.
Whether you use niche or general purpose sites, you have the space to
create job postings that deliver what job seekers consistently say they want: more
information about the opportunity you are offering. Resume
Searching Database
Size.
Bottom
Line.
Robust resume databases exist at both niche and general purpose sites,
but make sure the demographics of the database match your candidate profile
before making your investment. Job
Agents. Job agents are software applications that act as "personal shoppers" for job seekers. To use an agent, a person simply specifies the attributes of their dream job. The agent then compares that profile to the jobs posted at a site and notifies the job seeker privately whenever a match occurs. Sites that offer this feature tend to attract a high proportion of passive job seekers among their traffic because it takes the work out of watching the job market and protects their confidentiality. What do job agents have to do with a resume database? The profiles that job seekers create with their job agents are the functional equivalent of a site's candidate database. While you can't access their information, the agent effectively does the searching for you. Not only does that arrangement pose less of a risk for job seekers (thereby encouraging their participation), but it precludes your having to learn the Boolean syntax at each and every resume database. In our survey:
Bottom line. Wherever possible, use sites that offer a job agent feature as it will likely improve your reach into the passive job seeker segment of the candidate population you're targeting. Resume
Age. Historically, resume age has been one of the prime metrics for evaluating the quality of a resume database. It has always been assumed that the younger the resumes, the better the data-base. But that's not necessarily always the case. Certainly, youthful resumes (those that are 90 days or less "old") provide good candidate information. But so too might even older resumes. That's right, resumes that are graying around the temples (those that are 2+ years old) can actually be a good source of potential candidates. How so? Because in today's job market, resumes that are that 2 or more years old probably describe a person who's been in their current job a year and a half or more and thus may well have (a) met the objectives they set for taking the job, (b) lost the supervisor (to another organization) whom they hired on to work for, and/or (c) had their employer re-located, restructured or re-imagined. In short, they are employed
but willing to look at another opportunity--the classical definition of a
passive job seeker. So, we think
the best resume database is one that has both
a section of young resumes and a section of older resumes.
Not only do they represent a fertile sourcing opportunity, but most
recruiters ignore them. In our survey:
Bottom line. You can optimize your yield from resume databases by focusing on sites that offer access to stale as well as fresh resumes. _________________________________________________________________________ The Click-Ready Job Posting Over
the past several months, the length of time that people spend looking at content
on the Web has declined. According
to Nielson/NetRatings, the duration of a page view dropped from 56 seconds in
March to 49 seconds in June. Now,
that may not seem like much, but we’re talking about less than one minute
here, so every second counts. To
put it another way, if your posting can’t sell your opportunity in 49 seconds
or less, you’ve probably wasted the time, effort and money you invested in it. How
can your postings use every single second effectively?
The following tips will help you out: Ź
Write a great title
for your posting.
It should have enough sizzle to catch the eye of speed-reading job
seekers and enough information to pique their curiosity (so they’ll open the
ad). Ź
Make sure your posting
downloads quickly with a standard (56K) modem.
While graphical images and pictures can heighten the impact of an ad,
they can also dramatically slow its appearance on an impatient job seeker’s
screen. Ź
Put some real
punch into the first five lines of your posting.
Make sure they offer a hard-hitting summary of your position’s value
proposition. Optimally, you should
describe why the opening is a dream job with a dream employer and the
position’s salary, expressed in numbers. Ź
Format the content of
your posting for fast-moving eyeballs.
Since most people scan, rather than read information on the Web, it’s
best to use headlines and bullets—not long sentences and paragraphs—to
convey your opening’s benefits. Ź
Provide for impulse
communications.
Include either a telephone number or an e-mail address for
spur-of-the-moment questions from curious candidates.
People visit recruitment sites during the evening and on weekends, so to
be truly effective, the telephone number should be answered 24/7 and your
responses to e-mail messages should be sent within 30 minutes, also 24/7. People are now clicking through online pages the way they use a TV remote, so job postings will have to be re-designed for high speed messaging in order to reach out and touch candidates. _________________________________________________________________________ E-Mail Etiquette A recent survey by Vault.com found that many people do not feel comfortable using e-mail to discuss sensitive and/or personal matters. For example, of the poll respondents: ¨ 96.4% said they would prefer to ask for a raise in person; only 2.1% would address the subject by e-mail. ¨ 70% said they would feel uncomfortable notifying an employer of their resignation by e-mail; just 3.5% said that e-mail was fine for such a communication. ¨
64.9% felt it was best to praise a co-worker in person, while 30.5% felt
it was O.K. to do so by e-mail. Does this mean that e-mail is
not the right medium for discussing a person’s interests in an employment
opportunity? We don’t think so.
However, there are some steps you can take to ensure that your messages
don’t inadvertently cross into someone’s discomfort zone. Step
1: Employees are now well aware
that their employers have the right to read their e-mail if it's received
on-the-job. Hence, they may
consider any message received at work about a potential job change to be risky.
That is probably one of the reasons behind another interesting finding in
our latest survey of online job seekers. For
the first time, more people used job search Web-sites from home than from
work. Therefore, wherever possible,
use non-work related e-mail addresses to send your messages to prospective
candidates. Step
2: Begin your message by
telling the recipient how you got their name, especially if you contact them at
work. If they are not in the job
market, noting that you are contacting them on your own initiative (e.g.,
“I recently saw your posting on the XYZ newsgroup.”) will help defuse their
anxiety about receiving the message. And,
if they are engaged in an active job search, saying something like, “I
recently discovered your resume in the database at the XYZ site.” will
reassure them that their personal information is being used as they intended. Step
3: Do not include in your
message any personal information that you may have collected elsewhere on the
Web about a prospective candidate. Even
if that information is in the public domain (e.g., home address, telephone
number), recipients who see such publicity as an invasion of privacy are as
likely to blame the messenger as the original source.
And that can only hurt your recruiting efforts. Step 4: Give the recipient a way to respond to you other than e-mail. Not only are people often uncomfortable discussing sensitive or personal matters by e-mail, but e-mail itself is still not the preferred communications modality for many Americans. According to a survey of AOL users last year by Fast Company magazine, the most popular form of communication is the telephone, followed by face-to-face meetings and, then, by e-mail. By giving people the choice, you are allowing them to respond to your message in a way that is most comfortable for them … and that can only increase your yield. _________________________________________________________________________ The Sky
is Falling, The Sky is … Recently,
there has been a spate of pronouncements suggesting that the Web has been
over-hyped as a recruiting medium. The
Employment Management Association released its 2000 Cost per Hire and Staffing
Metrics Survey, reporting that only 8% of new hires had been derived from the
Internet. From the job seeker side,
the view was equally as pessimistic. According
to a Red Herring magazine poll of its
readers, only 4% had found their current job online.
And Forrester Research released the results of its own survey, which
determined that just 4% of “job changers” had found their latest job via the
Internet. Pretty
grim findings, but not exactly news. Our
survey of online job seekers noted dissatisfaction with the Internet increasing
as early as last Fall. The
problems we uncovered, however, weren’t caused by the Internet; they were the
by-products of recruiter lapses in using it.
Indeed, the three most frequent job seeker complaints were:
In
other words, the recent findings are not an indictment of the Internet—despite
what nay-sayers would like to believe—but rather customer feedback on the
level of service they’re getting online.
Plainly, job seekers are attracted to the Web—the traffic to
recruitment sites is growing, not declining, up an average of almost 80% over
1999—but they are not being served by the information and features they find
there. As a result, they come, they
look and they leave. Most don’t
respond to job postings, leave behind a resume in a database or spend much time
looking around. So, what’s to be done? The three sources of job seeker angst listed above form the outline of a strategy. Make sure your Web recruitment pro-gram avoids those three problems, and you’ll be way ahead of the competition in your ability to tap the growing pool of people using the Web to look for a new or better job. _________________________________________________________________________ Why
Bother? A
great job posting—one that will catch the eye of an “A” performer and help
sell them on your opportunity—takes time and effort to write.
Given the workload facing most recruiters, it’s appropriate to ask,
“Why bother?” The seven points
below answer that question. 1.
A classified ad stays in circulation for 1 day or a week, at most.
A job posting stays in the public eye a lot longer.
According to our survey of recruitment Web-sites, 90% post jobs for 30
days or more, and 60% post them for 60+ days. 2.
A classified ad sells a single position.
A job posting, which is often cheaper than a classified, sells both a
position and your employer. Indeed,
given the space available (most sites allow 1400 words or the equivalent of 2
typed pages of text), a posting is actually an electronic sales brochure, which,
if well written, can help fill an opening and differentiate your
organization’s brand. 3.
Job seekers are tired of reading classified ad copy in cyberspace.
According to our survey of online job seekers, their satisfaction with
online employment resources has declined by over 17% in just the past year.
The number one complaint? Lack
of information. They want job
postings that are comprehensive and detailed so that they can evaluate your
opportunity effectively. 4.
Many recruiters still don’t get it.
They bring documents designed for the print medium (i.e., classified ad
copy and position descriptions) and an attitude left over from a buyer’s labor
market that no longer exists (as evidenced by their use of terms like
“requirements” and “responsibilities” in their ads) to online
recruitment advertising. Do the
opposite (i.e., design your postings for the Internet and with an eye towards
today’s seller’s labor market) and you will give your employer a powerful
competitive advantage in the War for Talent. 5.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the duration of a page view (the length
of time people spend looking at a page of content, such as a posting) is now
just 56 seconds. A well written
posting has enough information in the right format to sell a job’s value
proposition in that space of time. Classified
ad copy & position descriptions don’t. 6.
Today, anyone with a pulse is employed.
While they may not be happy with their current employer, it is “the
devil they know.” Because most of
us are risk adverse, we need to be persuaded to give the “devil we don’t
know” (i.e., a new boss, a new commute) a try.
A well written job posting has the sales power to do just that. 7. According to HeadHunter.net, 40% of all new Web users come online to look at employment opportunities. With more than 90 million jobs currently being advertised online, only a well written posting will stand out in the crowd. _________________________________________________________________________ X-Raying for Resumes According
to one estimate, there are now 16 million resumes online and more are posted
every week. How do you find these
documents without wasting a lot of time? One
technique that has proven effective is “x-raying.”
It lets you search a specific domain (e.g., a local or national Internet
Service Provider) to locate a specified document or kind of document such as a
resume or homepage that is posted there. Although you can use almost any search engine to x-ray a domain, we’ve achieved the best results with AltaVista (www.altavista.com). To begin, open its Advanced Search feature and enter a Boolean string constructed as follows. host:aspecificdomain.com
AND resume AND “the skill set for which you’re searching” For
example, to search the Internet Service Provider Erols for the resumes of
accountants, you would enter the following string: host:erols.com
AND resume AND (accountant OR accounting) This
string will search the Erols domain and locate any resumes that contain the
title "accountant" or the skill "accounting." The
domains of MSN, AOL, Worldnet.att.net and other companies that provide Internet
access are especially good places to use x-raying.
Many now offer free homepages and resume storage as a part of their
standard service package. To
identify resumes near your location, x-ray the domains of local ISPs; to look
further afield, try the domains of national providers.
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