Recently, I had the privilege of keynoting a national conference on internet recruiting. I've spoken at a number of such meetings over the past two or three years, but this one was different. It left me feeling hopeful that online recruiting was finally gaining some ground among mainstream human resources professionals.
While these meetings have historically been attended by the early adopters of the employment field -- independent and third part recruiters -- the audience at this conference was packed with human resources practitioners. They worked for large and small employers, in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, operating facilities located all over the United States and abroad.
In most cases, they were designated employment specialists in their organization's HR departments, with responsibility for staffing in a wide range of technical and professional occupations. And here's the kicker -- they weren't just curious about the Internet as a recruiting medium, they seemed determined to learn how to put it to work for them.
That interest marks an important new direction for the online recruiting industry. If it endures, there is every reason to believe that internet recruiting will successfully change from a niche novelty to an established practice, and from a much hyped techno-fad to a standard candidate acquisition strategy. There are numerous potholes that could derail this momentum, however, and I've described six of the most troublesome below.
HR is the last in line. Too many employers expect their HR departments to attract and recruit world class professionals with bush-league tools. These organizations spend freely for technology in the sales and marketing, finance and accounting, product design and manufacturing areas, but turn into Scrooges when outfitting the HR department. As a result, while virtually every other functional area in the organization uses top-of-the-line or even custom-tailored systems, recruiters frequently have to work with hand-me-down or underpowered computers and out-of-date management information systems. More often than not, they also have inadequate Internet access and are under-trained in the use of the technology they do have. At the bottom line, too many HR departments are technology welfare cases, and -- not surprisingly -- this techno-poverty significantly degrades the performance and productivity of their staff recruiters.
Inadequate recruitment advertising budgets. In most organizations, today, online recruiting is viewed as an additional strategy for candidate acquisition. In other words, HR managers see the Internet as a new and increasingly effective staffing technique which complements and extends traditional recruitment practices. It will not replace print advertising, job fairs and campus visits, but instead, supplements and extends them.
That view makes good sense, yet many HR departments are trying to implement online recruiting on the cheap. They want to add the new strategy to their recruiting arsenal, but aren't willing to make the case for the increased funding required to enable it to work. And in a seller's labor market, that kind of something-for-nothing approach to investing in recruitment makes as much sense as trying to base your retirement plan on winning the lottery. Mathematically, it's possible; realistically, you can forget about it.
Poorly organizational web-sites. Even a quick tour of the Internet today makes it painfully obvious that most organizational web sites are designed either to give goose bumps to the CIO or to pump up the bonus of the VP of Sales. Senior management in these organizations has ceded the design, budget and maintenance of their online headquarters to the technologists who know how to build them -- which makes as much sense as assigning financial management to the facility maintenance department because it keeps the heat and lights on. Others think the Information Superhighway is simply an electronic extension of the organization's product and service catalog.
Recruitment, when it is included at all, is usually a small and inconspicuous part of the plan, and the language and images used to promote employment opportunities on organizational sites are seldom original or engaging, and the resulting content usually involves little more than job postings written for in-house bulletin boards or print classifieds. Predictably, such mediocre-to-nonexistent attention achieves equally mediocre-to-nonexistent results.
The Internet illiteracy of HR professionals. Despite the hopeful sign I mentioned above, too many HR practitioners still think that communicating by e-mail brings them up to the state-of-the-art in today's information economy. They know next to nothing about the Internet or how to use it on-the-job. They need to recruit the best candidates for an increasingly wired workplace, yet don't have a clue about writing effective online job postings, using Boolean operators to search resume data bases, or evaluating recruitment web sites to determine where and when to spend advertising money online.
Sadly, these HR professionals are the Luddites of the Information Age. They remain locked in yesterday's capabilities, unwilling to tap the power which online technology offers and unable, as a consequence, to shape its impact on their profession. Inevitably, this recidivism hurts the organizations which employ them and, ultimately, their own career prospects.
Recruiters who think that cyberspace changed their job. Some of the recruiters who are using the Internet today have decided that sourcing candidates is the most important aspect of their job. They are infatuated with the technological tricks that permit them to root around in corporate web sites and newsgroups and to peep into association bulletin boards and personal web pages. They spend their days and nights compiling lists of e-mail addresses for prospective candidates whom they then bombard with messages soliciting their interest in today's job openings. It's all very impersonal and nearsighted. Indeed, it completely ignores the most powerful capability provided by the Internet -- the ability to establish and nurture long term relationships with candidates.
The Internet enables recruiters to connect and communicate with hundreds, even thousands of individuals on a one-to-one basis. That's how recruiters really earn their money -- by getting to know the skills and aspirations of individuals and matching their attributes with appropriate opportunities that are available today or likely to be tomorrow. Building such relationships is hard work, however, and too many online recruiters would rather play at high technology's version of kindergarten recruiting: finding the round peg for the round hole.
CEO's who still don't get it. Despite labor shortages that are real and permanent, many business leaders still think that there are lots of people who would knock down the door to come work for them. Despite position vacancies that are crimping operations and disrupting key business initiatives, these same executives still think that world-class workers can be easily and quickly replaced, using good, old fashioned industrial era recruiting and employment tactics.
Despite all the chest beating about the emergence of human capital, many CEO's still don't walk the talk; they pontificate about the importance of people and treat them like carbon paper -- an almost limitless resource which is acquired for pennies and thrown out after use. That kind of outlook has a profound impact on the culture of an organization, which cannot be hidden (at least, for long) from the best and brightest in the workforce. And when such retro-leadership becomes apparent, no recruiting strategy on earth -- not the Internet or the best of traditional practices -- will make a difference. Open positions won't be fill, and ironically, recruiters will take the blame.
