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Outsurfed and out of touch?
Online jobseekers are now more advanced than corporate recruiters in
both their usage and expectations of online recruitment. This is the major
finding of the Workthing Employment and Recruitment Study 2003.
The principal problem, highlighted by the survey, is the HR community's
now passé perception of how online job seekers behave, and what
kind of information they now seek. See the HR online lag
factor.
Underpinning this lag factor is the limited use of online recruitment in the full recruitment mix. See under-use
or underestimation?
The net effect is that the average UK organisation's corporate web presence will not win the war for the
talent they seek to attract. Nor will it deliver the resourcing efficiencies
possible from recruiting online. See cost, time
and quality control.
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The HR online
lag factor
As well as the now-recognised
push toward online recruitment that comes from the resourcing efficiencies
it offers, there is now substantial pull from the jobseeker market itself.
Where jobseekers look:
| 53% of HR directors think very few jobseekers go to their corporate
site |
YET |
6.3m online
jobseekers say they have searched for jobs on corporate sites |
What they look for when they get there:
| Just 29% of corporate sites talk about career progression |
YET |
The overwhelming majority
- 92% - of online jobseekers choose employers on the basis of career
prospects and 90% on salary benefits - so this type of information
is vital |
How they use the web:
| Less than half - 42% - of UK companies have an application form
on their corporate career site |
YET |
The number of online
jobseekers happy to send their CV over the web has almost tripled
in two years (from 17% to 46%). Jobs found online produced 5.8m
applications in the past year alone |
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Under-use
or underestimation?
The Workthing research points to two main factors that may account for this lag factor:
- Under-use, ie breadth over depth of online usage
Although 89% of HR managers are now using online recruitment (job board,
corporate career sites and intranet), most of this use is confined
to placing online ads; this suggests a toe-dipping trend in the use
of online - Underestimating the place of online in the recruitment mix
While companies spent some £80m on online recruitment last year,
they continued to spend a colossal £1.15bn on off-line recruitment
media; this suggests that online may be an 'as well as', not the 'instead
of' it has the potential to be.
| 73% of HR directors complain of low quality
applications in the form of irrelevant CVs |
YET |
A mere 19% use online sifting and screening tools that
would allow them to filter out low-quality candidates at the front
end |
| 68% cite cost per hire as a major recruitment issue |
YET |
Just 44% actually track their cost per hire (via online tracking
tools) |
| 71% of HR say their time to hire is too long, and 62% admit to spending
too much HR time processing applications |
YET |
85% are still sorting CVs by hand, while just 31% have time-saving
automated response tools |
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Cost, time and quality control
The companies that have committed greater investment to their online recruitment
have already realised returns.
HR directors in the survey cited cost, time and quality of applicants
as the three major recruitment issues they face, and these factors all
have the potential for significant gains from online recruitment, as our
experience with our own corporate clients shows:
- Cost: Arcadia
has made significant cost savings within one year of adopting online
recruitment solution.
Read
case study.
- Time to hire:
Tussauds Group has reduced time to hire by two-thirds through strategic
use of online recruitment.
Read
case study.
- Quality: Tesco
radically cut the number of candidates coming through to assessment
centre stage by implementing PeopleBank online sifting tools to eliminate
poor quality candidates at a much earlier stage.
Read
case study.
About the research
Comprised of two parallel surveys commissioned in 2003 by Workthing
to explore usage and perception of online recruitment among:
1. 250 HR directors from major UK companies (conducted by research
consultancy BDK)
2. Internet users (conducted by research company BMRB)
The full research findings are available to purchase from BT click&buy
for £195. Click
here to buy it
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| We can conduct a comprehensive audit of your online employer branding. More » |
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