As
everyone knows we use guest writers from time to time. Rocky Hopson, proprietor
of Online Reporting Service (www.youapplyhere.com),
has submitted a timely article to us for publication. Hope you enjoy it.
With
over 40,000 job boards on the Web, what is the single best tool for recruiting
on the Internet? It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. You need to
use the Web to be successful, but you don’t have the time to waste on
ineffective recruiting tools. For example, most are great for resume searches
while only a few handle applications and focus on the hourly employee job
market.
The
Web has given birth to new recruiting media and tools that make some aspects of
the recruiting process faster and less expensive. Job boards have effectively
improved upon the help wanted classified ad model for job advertising and
application, and some of the Web-based applicant management systems bring speed
and process efficiency to previously slow and manually burdened hiring
operations. And, to effectively compete for talent, every growing company needs
to add Web-based recruiting to their recruiting plans.
Adopting
a Web-based recruiting strategy and sustaining that advantage requires an
on-going investment of resources. New tools will be invented, old tools will
change and the only way to stay abreast of what’s going on is continuous
research and learning. Because if you don’t your competition will.
However,
Web-based recruiting is still in its infancy. We are still learning how to build
the tools to attract, select and retain the most qualified candidates via the
Internet. There are some techniques now being used that work and some can even
get the job done well. Those who figure it out will obviously have a great
advantage over those that do not.
It
is important to focus your limited time on best practices. We have enough
experience on the Web at this point to know what works and what doesn’t in
today’s recruiting strategies. There are thousands of recruiters using the Web
to source candidates, but precious few are using the medium to recruit them, and
even fewer focus on the hourly employee. The
difference between those two activities is best practices.
The
concept of best practices consists of these activities:
Recruiters
can utilize the Web for placement of online job ads, and for resume and
application research. However, it’s moved from just resume submissions
to a very useful tool for employers looking for hourly employees as well. The
requirements for hourly workers are much different than the typical resume based
worker than part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers where the time is not a
set 8 hours. But for the experienced online recruiter, the Web can offer
unlimited possibilities and help a good strategy and make it better.
Some
of the more common benefits to Web recruiting are listed below:
These
are the basic principles of Web-base recruiting: There is no one solution that
can do it all. You must implement a Web-base strategy that's specifically
tailored to your existing and future requirements. It will take planning and
guidance and for those who invest in the understanding of the best practices
on the Web have the knowledge and skills required to design and implement a
process quickly and effectively. This is the key to effective Web-based
recruitment.
Rocky
Hopson is president of Online Reporting Service Inc. that operates www.YouApplyHere.com,
a Web-based job recruiting service specializing in hourly based full-time,
part-time, and temporary positions within the retail, restaurant and food
service, grocery, lodging, hospitality, administration, and service support.
In
the last year or so, we have written about using the Internet for sales leads
rather than looking at it strictly as a recruiting method. This Internet
service, TrueAdvantage, makes that goal a lot easier by compiling and
distributing information to your desktop identifying qualified prospects that
are more “likely to buy” than simply cold-called prospects.
They
offer information solutions including company intelligence, sales intelligence,
executive intelligence, selling opportunities and purchasing trends.
This
is a fee-based subscription service that you log onto with a user name and
password. They have a full time staff of 30+ researchers that source and verify
the contents of their database which is built mainly from newspapers, magazines,
company Web sites, trade shows, email lists, client databases, cold call lists,
Web surfing, lead services, referrals, special applications, data feeds and
aggregators.
The
information is compiled for you in their database and you can search for
specific information most relevant to your business. Categories for searching
include emerging businesses, new business deals, relocating businesses, job
bank, management changes, and mergers/acquisitions…all likely candidates for
some type of personnel/HR changes. You can also search for leads by geography as
well.
You
can log onto the database and search for whatever you like or you can set up
automatic email feeds with your interests and sit back and wait for the emails
from TrueAdvantage to arrive.
There
are three main categories to the service. The meat of their service, Hiring
Intelligence, offers a large, searchable database full of companies nationwide
that have made public announcements that you might be interested in. Company
Intelligence is where you go to investigate a potential client or source
company. A database of thousands of companies including the names and contact
information for their senior executives. Their Contact Manager manages your
information and contacts online and schedules your follow up calls and actions.
You can also export any leads/contacts into your contact management software.
They
can also customize a solution for your company including targeted lead
generation, campaigns, direct mail follow up, event registration and follow up,
list verification and clean up, and/or account mapping. They try to become a
seamless extension of your sales and marketing staff.
For
this review I signed up for their free three-day trial and found a number of
good leads here in the St. Louis area for companies moving into town, companies
that just received a large contract and other strong leads ready for my contact.
Pricing:
From $1,995.00 per year for
a single-user license up to $4,995.00 per year for a 5-person site license.
Volume pricing discounts are also available.
My
contact for this article, Tim Hartrich, can be reached toll free at 888-508-8783
Ext. 225 or 773-241-7000. Also, you can email Tim at TrueAdvantage@earthlink.net.
Or you can register for a free trial at http://www.trueadvantage.com/ta/uilogin.asp?partnersite=6789.
Can’t hurt.
With
the proliferation of unemployed professionals on the market today resume
delivery services are quite popular with the candidates. Typically, these
services advertise that for a low fee…anywhere between $30 and $60 they will
forward the candidates resume to hundreds and sometimes thousands of recruiters
nationwide. Being a sucker for most anything free I do sign up for most of these
services. I don’t necessarily go looking for them but offers of free resumes
show up in my InBox regularly. Normally, you simply log in…fill out a brief
questionnaire and then sit back and wait for the resumes to arrive in you email.
With most services you are able to filter out unwanted resumes. I normally ask
for only the MIS/IT people in my area but some services offer better filtering
than others. Although I do get some local candidates, a national recruiter would
get a bigger benefit.
Admittedly,
most of these resumes get the delete treatment. They are either out of my
discipline or out of my geographic territory but…overall…I do receive
resumes of people that I can use and can say I have placed at least one
candidate I have received from these services.
Sometimes
they give me ideas as well. Recently, I received a resume from a credit card
marketing candidate, even though I would never request such a candidate. Great
looking profile, MBA…the whole works. I thought that even though marketing
placements are not my forte, I should contact this candidate with the hope of
marketing him to the local headquarters of a credit card company. We
communicated and I gained his permission to market him to this prestigious
organization, which was no surprise, which is why he was blasting his resume out
in the first place. Then, of course, the HR contact told me to take a hike.
But…it kept me busy for a few minutes.
Also,
this practice goes a long way towards one goal you should have that I mentioned
in my last article, building your candidate database while candidates are easily
available. I received close to a dozen resumes a day. Most, that I can’t use
right now, I file away for a rainy day. Here is a list of the services I belong
to. I am sure there are many more available. If anyone knows of any additional
services of this nature, please send me an email with the Web address. I am
going to post these on the Swat Recruiting Web site as well.