Online recruitment: Looking ahead

Section six of the Personnel Today Management Resources one stop guide on online recruitment, covering: changes to technology; recruitment channels; and the future of HR-XML. Other sections .

Future developments

I make no pretensions at being a 'Mystic Meg' who might be able to tell the future of recruitment from reading the stars. Instead, with my over 20 years experience in recruitment, I will try and look at some of the coming trends. Not all are about the internet, as recruitment must be about the complete experience for candidate and employer alike, not just a single aspect. That said, technology will be the headline grabber and the first section. What follows is a list of the changes and developments that might happen with the main participants in the recruitment supplier chain. This section closes with a discussion of one element of the future that is happening right now: HR-XML.

Three trends that will change e-recruitment

1 Technology is an enabler

  • Broaden the reach and scope of communication with candidates

  • Increase the accuracy and speed of communication

  • Retain and manage candidate and job profile information more accurately

  • Better matching, assessment and selection tools

  • Create interactive real time marketplace

  • Create long-term talent pools

    2 Evolution of the communication interface

  • Expanding use of devices = m-recruitment (mobile recruitment)

  • PDA

  • Interactive TV

  • Mobile phone

  • Kiosks

  • Bandwidth - high-speed access

  • Broadband

  • ADSL

  • Bluetooth

  • Electronic Signatures

    3 Extension of technology access

  • More than 600 million people have Net access (Nua.com: Nov 2002)

  • Mobile phone subscribers in the UK downloaded 340 million web pages to Internet-enabled devices during September 2002, according to the Mobile Data Association (MDA).

  • Broadening of internet penetration to socio-economic groups and geographic spread will expand accessibility of job opportunities

  • Companies will use better tools to identify and communicate with prospective candidates

  • Candidates will use print and traditional media as a guide to identify industry sectors or companies/brands and then use the Internet for research and application for jobs

  • Increasing use of web based referrals, from chat groups to company led programmes.

  • Candidates will participate in talent pools of selected employers

    How online recruitment channels will change

    What specific role will the various recruitment channels (job boards, recruitment firms, advertising agencies, corporate websites, software providers) play in the future?

    Job boards

  • Cheap advertising medium, replicating role of classified

  • Build corporate brand - driving candidates to corporate website

  • Diversification into niche solutions

    Geographical

    Vertical

    Skills-based

    Compensation

  • Increased sophistication of tool sets

    Screening

    Testing - psychometric and skills

    Applicant tracking

    Recruitment companies

  • Traditional High Street will remain a strength

  • Specialised/niche recruiting, eg, head hunting will grow

  • Managed services

  • Outsourcing of complete recruitment function

  • Temporary/casual labour market

  • Interim management

  • Add-on services

  • Design/copywriting for print and the web

  • Recruitment websites

  • Cross posting of job ads

    Advertising agencies

  • Traditional services

  • Design and copywriting of ads and job specifications

  • Media advice and purchase (expanding to include online media)

  • Recruitment website design and build

  • Corporate Recruitment Branding

  • Move to value added services

  • Advise on recruitment strategy

  • Develop candidate marketing - CRM tools and techniques

  • Technology advice and selection

  • Set up customer service and fulfilment programmes

  • Sales Assistance

    Corporate websites

  • Home as centre of all recruitment activity

  • Advertising, attraction, traffic drivers all geared to deliver candidates to Corporate site

  • Tools for interactive relationship building with candidates and employees

  • Building a Corporate Brand specifically for recruitment

  • Interface with assessment, selection, tracking tools

    Software providers

  • Develop better searching/matching tools

  • Web-based interactive communications between candidates and all parties in the recruitment chain

  • More sophisticated assessment and testing tools

  • Creation of Talent Pool environment

  • Slicker communication interfaces and integration

  • PDAs, mobile phones, SMS, television

  • Take out the 'administrivia'

  • Employee and candidate self service environments

    How HR-XML will change online recruitment

    HR-XML is an attempt to formulate a standard for data communication within the HR community, based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

    XML describes the information it formats using tags.

    HR-XML initiative is working towards an HR-specific vocabulary.

    What is the HR-XML Consortium?

    HR-XML (www.hr-xml.org) is an independent, non-profit consortium, founded in December 1999, dedicated to enabling e-commerce and inter-company exchange of human resources (HR) data world-wide. The work of the Consortium centres on the development and promotion of standardised XML vocabularies for HR to streamline HR data interchange. Its mission is to produce specifications that are relevant and useful across many country contexts. HR-XML's current efforts are focused on standards for staffing and recruiting, compensation and benefits, training and workforce management. It is open to users, vendors, consultants, standards bodies, employers and other end-users, and individuals. HR-XML has over 115 organisational members in 22 countries. All of the standards and schemas are available for downloading on the website.

    What are some of the key building block projects currently underway?

    Cross-process objects, such as Contact Method, PersonName, PostalAddress, Competencies, WorkSite and WorkSite Environment, and Job and Position Header are among the building blocks for forthcoming specifications, such as SIDES and SEP (see below).

    Contact Method provides XML schema designers the patterns they need to capture postal addresses, phone numbers, e-mail, and online and wireless messaging. The Contact Method specification provides a generalised method of describing known contact methods and is designed to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate new variations.

    Job and Position Header specifications are high-level entities that may be used within a variety of HRM models and business processes. Both entities may be categorised into fragments such as Duties and Responsibilities, Work Policy, Requirements, and Work Schedule. The purpose of this project is to define Job and Position information that is common to all business processes. The schemas created from this project should be flexible enough to be used within other HR-XML Consortium schemas and be suitable for international use.

    The Resume 2.0 specification provides a definition for an XML Resume. The Resume 2.0 specification includes modules for employment, education, and military history.

    The BackgroundCheck 1.0 project focused on delivering a complete, but flexible schema to support requests to third-party providers of background checking services. The goal of Version 2.0 is to deliver a specification that will support the return of precise field search results. Version 1.0 included a relatively simple, but flexible means for reporting background check results.

    Recruiting and staffing

    The Consortium's Recruiting and Staffing Workgroup has developed the Staffing and Exchange Protocol (SEP), an XML-based messaging specification that supports dynamic, real-time staffing transactions over the web. Transactions supported by SEP include the posting of job opportunities to job boards and other recruiting venues and the return of resumes matching those postings. Global in scope, SEP 1.1 supports the updating and recall of job postings and the procurement of temporary and contract staff. Further extensions to SEP might include support for employment verification and reference checking.

    Staffing Industry Data Exchange Standards (SIDES)

    Staffing Industry Data Exchange Standards — commonly known by the acronym 'SIDES' — is a comprehensive suite of data exchange standards designed to offer new efficiencies and cost savings for staffing customers, staffing suppliers, and other stakeholders in the staffing supply chain. Major modules include: StaffingOrder; HumanResource; Assignment; StaffingSupplier; StaffingCustomer; StaffingAction; Extended TimeCard; and Invoice (an extended version of OAGIS 8.0 Invoice).

    The objective of SIDES is to provide a set of standards for the exchange of information between staffing customers, staffing suppliers, and intermediaries. SIDES consists of a suite of XML-based specifications designed to support a full range of staffing processes. SIDES will improve efficiency and reduce integration costs for all parties by dramatically reducing the need to design and implement custom interfaces to link to trading partner systems. Six leading staffing firms have endorsed SIDES. These firms were the sponsors that developed the original "straw man" version of SIDES, which was donated to the HR-XML Consortium for further refinement and development. The six staffing firms (Adecco, Kelly, Manpower, Randstad, Spherion and Vedior) have issued a co-authored letter of endorsement for SIDES.

    Personnel Today Management Resources one stop guide on online recruitment

    Section one: Why you can't ignore internet recruitment

    Section two: Nuts and bolts of online recruitment

    Section three: How to go online

    Section four: Implementing online recruitment

    Section five: Evaluating success

    Section six: Looking ahead

    Section seven: Case studies

    Section eight: Legal issues when recruiting online

    Section nine: Research on online recruitment

    Section ten: Resources

    Section eleven: Jargon buster