The state-of-the-art in online recruiting today is a melange of techniques primarily designed to perform candidate sourcing. There are nifty little tricks for lurking in newsgroups, uncovering individual links attached to corporate home pages and -- the fad du jour -- flipping organizational web sites. Visit virtually any recruiter's bulletin board in cyberspace or attend a training seminar or conference about Internet recruiting, and you'll hear quite a buzz about these tools-of-the-trade and their stealthy capacity for what's appropriately called "mining candidates."
These techniques enable you to drill into the richly populated seams running through cyberspace and connect you with the active and passive job seekers hidden there. Their focus and utility, however, is short term: they only dredge up candidates for current position vacancies. As a consequence, they are helpful, but less than efficient. They usually get the job done, but you must use them over and over again for each new job opening because they produce no residual resource with which you can work. Or, to put it another way (and at the risk of overdoing the analogy), they force you to go down into the mines every time you need a new gem on staff.
The remedy to this situation is a new genre of techniques designed to build candidate relationships. These tools add warehousing and distribution capabilities to your mining effort. They enable you to acquire and maintain a private reservoir of talent with which you can meaningfully interact and to which you can effectively promote your employment opportunities. In the process, they extend your recruiting horizon into a short-term/long-term continuum that efficiently develops candidates for both the open positions you have now and those you will have in the future.
These capabilities represent the next state-of-the-art in online recruiting. The technology behind the tools, however, exists right now. Indeed, online information warehousing and distribution techniques are already a significant component of e-commerce, the retail sales and marketing activity on the Internet. Hence, the evolution of Internet recruiting depends not on developing some new level of technological sophistication, but on our willingness to apply the technology we already have and to do so effectively.
Assuming that we can muster the will to move forward, the success of our application will turn on three tenets: efficiency, conservancy and communication.
Efficiency. Right now, candidate information is consumed wastefully, much like cheap energy. But with workforce shortages already impacting many industries and with those shortages likely to worsen as demographic realities take hold, recruiters must devise new ways of using such information efficiently.
For example, numerous recruiters discard all of the resumes received in response to a job posting, except those few which describe candidates who are qualified for the opening. Similarly, when their mining efforts uncover resumes which don't match the specifications for the position they are currently trying to fill, they overlook them. Yet, many of those rejected resumes describe individuals who may be potential candidates.
Indeed, any resume involving any occupational field which an organization currently employs represents someone it may need to recruit in the future. And warehousing that resume now, when it's available, is a much more efficient way to source the candidate than mining for their resume later, when a position vacancy looms large and the pressure is on to get it filled.
Conservancy. In order to capture the efficiency described above, it's critical that the candidate information be conserved so that it is easily accessed and searched. In other words, if all of those resumes that have been collected are then stored as unindexed e-mail files or, worse, printed and filed, there will be no effective way to find a specific document when it's needed. The net result is a warehouse full of info-junk.
Felicitously, data management technology now makes it possible to store the resumes, with a minimum of work, in an electronic archive or database and to index them properly so that they can be efficiently searched as future requirements are identified. Such an archive is a genuine competitive advantage in today's workforce-constrained environment. It provides a resource with which to jump start an organization's recruiting efforts, enabling it to connect swiftly with prospective candidates, while other recruiters are still trying to find out who and where they are.
Communication. That connection will yield a much higher positive response rate if on-going communications are established with each of the individuals represented by a resume in the database. In other words, people are more likely to pay attention to those who have paid attention to them.
Technology can help out here, as well. Using e-mail, recruiters can now efficiently communicate with hundreds, even thousands of prospective candidates on a regular basis and at virtually no cost. They can keep each and every person informed of their organization's plans and up-to-date on its progress and success. Further, by connecting the computers which manage their e-mail with those which manage their database, recruiters can personalize these messages so that each is tailored to the unique occupational field, geographic location or aspirations of its recipient. Such mass one-to-one communications enable recruiters to develop a personal relationship with candidates and to sell your organization, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The sum of these three tenets is relationship recruiting. They help you to treat every individual as a prospective candidate, to remember the names and addresses and occupational fields and employment objectives of thousands of candidates, and to build enduring relationships with each and all of them, one at a time. If sourcing is about finding gems, then relationship recruiting is about stringing them into necklaces. It equips you to assemble an enduring collection of rare human talent.
