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The 5
Biggest Mistakes Companies Make
When Recruiting On-line and How You Can Avoid Them
By Diane
Propsner
Galileo Consulting
1. Lack of Planning
Failure to have a clear recruiting plan results in poor Internet
recruiting results. To effectively use the Internet as a recruiting tool involves more
than haphazardly posting your opening to job posting sites. Critical to your success is
your ability to think like a job seeker when developing any recruiting program, including
the Internet.
In a recent conversation with a potential client looking to get
greater results with Internet recruiting, I asked what was their game plan? After a long
pause, the director of HR replied, "What game plan? We just started posting our jobs
to third party job boards."
Recruiting planning begins with the review and analysis of your
company's hiring goals, sourcing programs, recruiting process, recruiting metrics, and
resources: recruiting staff - internal or external as well as recruiting budget. By
knowing where you have been, where you presently are, and where you want to be, you are
well on your way to achieving Internet recruiting success. (Keep in mind that the goal is
to couple Internet recruiting with your other sourcing programs.) Pay close attention to
recruiting results, what works, and what does not work. From here, you can begin to
develop a world class Internet recruiting program. For some thoughts on this topic, read
my upcoming article, "How to Effectively Use the Internet as a Recruiting Tool - An
Overview for HR Professionals."
2. Lack of Resources
In the planning stage it is important to determine the investment
necessary for your Internet recruiting program. As an example, let's consider one area:
on-line advertising budget.
On an on-line recruiters' forum, I read, "I'm a recruiter with
a California-based software company and we are having a hard time recruiting software
developers. We advertise in the newspaper, but this is not working. What free sites can I
post my jobs to? Thanks."
Clearly free job posting sites can bring value. However, to increase
your ability to attract candidates, it is important to combine free sites with fee-based
sites as well as other on-line recruiting methods.
In the planning stage, determine the on-line advertising methods
that best attract the types of talent you typically hire. With this information, you can
secure the proper budget for your on-line advertising campaign.
3. Poorly Designed Career Section of the Corporate Web Site
Without a properly designed career section of your corporate web
site, the job seeker may look elsewhere for their next employment opportunity. For
additional information on this topic, refer to my article, "Is Your Corporate Web
Site Driving Candidates to Your Competitors?"
I recently spoke with a recruiter who was frustrated with Internet
recruiting. He commented to me, "We are posting our jobs all over the place. The
webmaster said that we have lots of people visiting our corporate site to check out our
jobs. If this is true, why aren’t we receiving more quality resumes?"
After reviewing the career section of this recruiter's company web
site, I understood why he was not receiving quality resumes. One reason was due to how
their jobs are listed, an important navigation component when developing a career section
that attracts top talent. When I visited their web site, 49 jobs with long position
descriptions were listed alphabetically. For the job seeker to find an appropriate
opportunity, he or she had lots of scrolling to do. Scrolling for a job seeker is death!
It takes way too much time. A less time consuming way is to point and click.
To improve the navigation of the web site, I suggested listing the
opportunities, either by function or title. Then when a job seeker sees a functional area
or title of interest, they point and click to get information about the opening.
If you would like to have this feature on your site, but do not have
the internal resources to do so, contact Sam Roseman at JobVertise. Sam has a free service
where he will create a job-listing page for your web site. I have referred many companies
to him with great success. Click here to visit his
web site and find out how you can immediately improve the navigation of your job-listing
page.
4. Poorly Written Position Descriptions
In this competitive employment marketplace, everyone is vying for
the same limited talent pool. Companies that are successful in attracting high quality
people into the interviewing process understand how important it is to have well written
position descriptions. For more information, see my article, "How to Write Position
Descriptions That Attract Super Stars!"
For a recent client, I was asked to identify the job posting sites
that would attract the talent for which they were looking. After this was completed, they
were ready to post the job openings . . . or were they? Prior to the jobs being
posted, I reviewed the position descriptions. The position descriptions were very long,
extremely dull, and out of date. (Many of the technical competencies they were looking for
were no longer necessary because they were outdated.) I contacted the hiring managers to
update the skills and backgrounds they now needed and then worked with a very talented
person in marketing communications to re-write the position descriptions. And WOW what a
difference! The new position descriptions literally jumped off the page. And by doing so,
the company now is now receiving lots of resumes from top-notch candidates.
Spend some time rewriting position descriptions that are not written
to attract top talent. Or partner with a team member in your marketing communications
department to help.
5. Lack of Willingness to Try New Ideas and Stay Current
The Internet is constantly changing. Some say that it changes every
three months. If you are to use the medium successfully for Internet recruiting, it is
very important that you stay current and be willing to try new ideas.
Staying current with Internet recruiting will enable you to
constantly fine tune your Internet recruiting program. One way to stay current is through
Internet researching. Under my links section, visit "Cool Links for HR
Professionals." Here you will find links for "Researching via the
Internet." The list of links starts with links to my favorite search engines: Snap
and HotBot. Also listed is Ask Jeeves, a fun and easy way of finding information because
it lets you ask your question in plain English. Also listed are links to various free
tutorials that will help teach you how to research on-line.
Happy Researching!
Don't be afraid to try new ideas. To drive this point home, let me
share with you a comment I recently read on an on-line recruiters' forum, "A little
experiment we tried around the office, was to post the same job twice. The only difference
being that we posted one with the actual salary range (or hourly rate) and the other
without. The posting with the salary/rate information in place (as opposed to the typical
"depends on experience") received more and better qualified responses."
Way to go! Trying new ideas really can pay off.
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