Online recruitment: Implementing online recruitment

Candidate attraction

We discussed earlier the Field of Dreams scenario. You now have put in place the process change, developed the technology infrastructure, researched and created the corporate recruiting message and built a great corporate careers page with all your fantastic jobs.

Is anyone coming into the interview process yet?

Your company will now have to work hard at implementing the communication strategy to deliver the recruiting message to the target market. In other words, we are talking about this year's buzzwords: the corporate recruitment brand.

Branding is 'the new black'. It is a more pronounced effort by the employer to declare exactly who they are or are trying to be. Branding cannot overcome reality, so you need to be clear about your company identity and use your marketing to project it.

Ask yourself:

It is also important to think carefully about what you want the recruitment brand to achieve. You should discuss what the company wants to be, what it should be and what it needs to be in future. And remember that branding is an investment in the long term.

Think about branding from the candidate's point of view. Brand 'careers' on the corporate website and make sure it is easy to find. You need to create a compelling message for the candidate about the company's culture and ideals. Present a positive experience on the website. And build relationships with candidates so that they are aware of the company and its talent needs now and in the future.

Candidate marketing

Marketing is harder work than product or services development, but it is absolutely necessary to 'make the sale'. It requires a range of elements including creative energy, focus, protracted thinking, messaging and design. Is your recruitment department dedicated to this task and does it have the skills to be a marketing organisation? If not, then you need to consider bringing in outside expertise through a recruitment advertising firm.

Finally, think about other daily communications techniques you can use to build a potential candidate network through e-mail marketing. Here are some key approaches:

Signature file - put information about your career opportunities, hot jobs or other key information into every e-mail you send

Targeted e-mail - Build subsets of e-mail address directories for hard-to-find skills and send targeted messages when new openings occur

Vcards - another way of attaching your address to outgoing e-mail, with the advantage that the recipients can add your address and other contact information directly to their address book

Building your network - Always ask in your e-mail messages if anyone can help you build up your candidate network

Links - make sure your website and e-mail address link to other sites and vice-versa

Media selection: how to choose your job board

You will undoubtedly use job boards as a primary driver of traffic to your corporate recruitment site. But with the Onrec.com database listing 578 job boards at the end of 2002, how do you select the job board(s) that will work for you? Once you have chosen the channels, how do you get the best results and performance from the job board? What are your responsibilities to make all of this work? Specifically, how do you write job ads that will be effective on-line?

The basics are to:

Choosing an online job site

You should be choosing your job board(s) based on the facts. Use the following list of the key criteria to assess whether a job board is the right one for your company.

It is important to understand that job boards describe their success in very different terms. If you have a basic knowledge of these terms, you will be a much better purchaser of services from the boards.

What do these statistics mean and how should you interpret them? The first key lesson is to ensure that any statistic is given to you in relation to a specific time period, usually per month. Among the statistics offered by job boards are:

These traffic statistics give clues to the relative success of the job board, but are not definitive. As an example, if a job board tells you its traffic figures are:

250,000 unique users in October 2002

500,000 visits in October 2002

5 million page views in October 2002

You could interpret this as:

Each unique user visits twice per month

Each visitor views 10 pages on each visit

Traffic figures should be independently audited.

www.abce.org.uk

Association of On-Line Recruiters

What other traffic data is relevant?

What is the traffic to specific areas of the site?

What are the number of job searches conducted on a specific job type?

How many applications are made via the job site?

User demographics

Where can you get demographics about candidates and employment sectors? There have been few independent sources until recently, with much of the best research being commissioned by Totaljobs.com and Workthing. There are now a number of major research companies providing net user research and adding employment related focus to that research.

Here are some other sources of information on job seekers:

Forrester

NORAS

Net Value

Net Ratings

Job sites' own user surveys

Target audience

You should always check that the site attracts your target audience. Any good job board should willingly provide you with profiles on their jobseekers and job advertisers. These profiles should include:

Sectors covered

You need to ask some basic questions such as whether or not the site covers your business sector, and whether sector professionals are likely to visit?

Find out what percentage of jobs on the site are in your business sector, and if there is any sector specific additional content. Is there any sector-specific marketing?

You could also ask if there are any links with trade associations.

You should look for testimonials from your competitors and employees.

Another good indicator is which sites your own employees use.

If your competitors do advertise on the site it suggests they are getting results. Have any companies recruited for a similar position recently?

Look at the feedback provided by the client and evaluate how credible it is. The sort of data you want is how many times the job was viewed and how many applications were received.

Brand

Does the site have the right brand and design for your target audience? Think about the kind of staff you are trying to attract. Does the site look and feel like the kind of site your employees would visit?

Choosing the right advertising package

You have selected the channel(s). What next?There are a number of different types of online job advertising and candidate attraction techniques that the job board can deliver, ranging from simple job listings - a basic classified ad posted on the web - to enhanced listings, which have the addition of some company specific information and logos to set your ad apart from the other classified listings. Then there are corporate brochure pages, which provide the opportunity to describe the company, culture and job in great depth and banner ads and link buttons which automatically link the job board (or other web pages) directly to your job advertisement.

Sites which provide access to a CV database can be useful, and with the right password, you can access the entire job board database of registered users. This is useful to determine if the job board attracts the types of candidates you are looking for.

Choosing a package

What are some of the elements that you should consider?

Online copywriting

The more time you spend writing a good job advertisement, the better your responses will be, so take the same care as you do with off-line press copy. You need to approach the task by thinking like a jobseeker. Job title and job summary can be critical and you must emphasise essential skills. Make a compelling proposition. And understand the job board search engines. Quality, not quantity is the result that counts. The key data that you are used to putting into your print media ads is still required, but the emphasis that you place on information and where you put it into the ad will change - most searching on the web is conducted either with key words or on specific fields (location, job title, salary) so this needs to be considered.

Think in those terms as you prepare your ad layout, and ensure that the searchable items are at the top of the ad. If you are taking a job listing ad, that is the only information that will actually appear. With an enhanced ad or corporate profile type of ad, the scope for additional material is limited only by your budget.

Where else can you post your jobs?

There are alternatives to posting your ads on commercial job boards and many of these additional sites actively encourage organisations to use their services, either directly or indirectly via sponsoring sections of their websites.