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The internet has transformed the process of finding and recruiting

staff. Cisco, one of the world’s leading technology firms, now conducts 90

per cent of all graduate recruitment through its site and has cut staff

acquisition costs in half. Today’s technology allows HR departments to

screen across all personnel to identify critical skills before being

forced to advertise.

Most companies have been slow to exploit the cost savings and benefits of

online recruitment, however. Many organisations, like oil multinational

Shell, would like to consolidate recruitment online, but are then faced

with re-engineering the entire recruitment process.

In Shell’s case, this would mean aggregating recruitment from 1,700

operating companies and 50 affiliated web sites (see panel, p33). Delaying

the process means big opportunities for IT providers such as Best

International and NETTEC, which are moving quickly to sell their vision of

an outsourced, all-singing online recruitment system with a price tag

starting at around #100,000.

At issue is how companies will manage the move into online recruitment and

how far they will absorb some of the clever things advanced systems can

offer, such as tracking, filtering and unified application forms as

standard. As they deliberate, the agencies are jumping in, and most say

they’re experiencing stunning growth. Some, like Stepstone

(www.stepstone.co.uk), are UK bred and have no connection with traditional

high-street recruiters, although murmurs suggest this, too, is likely to

change. Rapid online agency growth has also attracted US players such as

Monster (www.monster.com), now the biggest job board in the US. One thing

is certain: nearly 70 per cent of job seekers say job hunting online makes

the most sense for them, and this will rise.

But according to Best International, UK companies are a long way from

effective online recruitment. Its January report Corporate Recruitment

Websites suggests that UK companies are a long way behind their

counterparts in the US. Best found that 30 per cent of FTSE 100 companies

don’t have recruitment web sites, although 68 per cent of job seekers said

the internet was their preferred method of searching and applying for

jobs.

What’s more, of the 70 per cent of companies that do have sites, 25 per

cent are focused purely on graduate recruitment and completely ignore

second jobbers. Companies following this line include Tesco,Barclays and

Powergen.

In addition, none of the sites reviewed made the most of existing

technology, and few sites made little more than a passing effort to

attract and build relationships with passive job seekers - people not

actively looking for new jobs, but eager enough to take one up should the

right offer come along.

For example, although most companies flag recruitment links on their home

pages, few include links throughout their web sites. Indeed, Best found

that only two companies made any effort to create an ongoing dialogue with

potential candidates, whether or not they had any vacancies. This

contrasts neatly with the approach of internet software company Cisco,

which screens and then tracks individuals who have approached it for a

job, reviewing its openings when they come up.

Skills shortages put a premium on establishing relationships and

attracting in the right kind of personnel. Cisco achieves this by tracking

web traffic to and from its own site to build up a profile of surfing

activity. The company then runs advertisements on those sites which drive

traffic to Cisco. But it doesn’t stop there. According to Janet Huckvale,

human resources manager in the UK, this has led Cisco offices in small US

towns to stage some unlikely events, such as guerrilla marketing

promotions in local garden centres. The result, she said, is to build

awareness of the brand and help to drive more traffic to the web site.

In the UK, the situation is summed up by Jake Rudham, an analyst with

Best: ”Very few UK companies are catering for second jobbers and our

research indicates that people want to use the web, but are constrained by

the limitations of corporate sites when they get there.” Such comments are

backed by the figures: 55 per cent of job seekers remembered visiting

leading job boards, hubs and recruitment agencies, but couldn’t remember

if they’d looked at corporate sites.

McKinsey, Arthur Andersen, PricewaterhouseCoopers and many of the other

big London consultancy firms are now beginning to invest in online

recruitment sites which provide very clear content and direction for

graduates, as well as staff profiles to help potential recruits understand

the culture of the firm. Arthur Andersen was due to launch a site at the

end of last month; but PricewaterhouseCoopers, despite being the biggest

recruiter of graduates in the UK - taking on 1,400 every year - has yet to

bring its UK recruitment site up to the standard of the site for its other

offices such as the Netherlands.

Jackie Alexander, PWC’s head of human resources, says: ”There are no grand

plans to develop the site, although online screening and assessments have

been a huge success in the Netherlands. For the moment, the site will stay

simple. We’re bringing in online job applications and, within six months,

we’ll introduce online assessments. The reason we’re not doing more is

because there are a lot of issues to think about and that means we have to

wait.”

Managing the development of an all-embracing recruitment site is proving

to be a big problem for UK firms. The biggest hurdle, according to Rudham,

is that no single department within a company has responsibility for the

final product; it’s a joint effort.

So input is needed from marketing, which is responsible for all branding

and external relations; human resources, responsible for internal and

external personnel issues; and recruitment, a sub-section of human

resources responsible for the business of finding and acquiring the right

people.

Rudham says: ”Corporations are responding to the needs of job seekers, but

struggling to develop their sites because no single department will take

responsibility for the job. Some companies are appointing new-media

managers to bridge this need for technological understanding and

marketing, but they’re still failing to sort out the central problem.”

Resolving this issue is a proving to be a challenge, because the subject

has yet to gain sufficient importance in the boardroom. e But it’s

beginning to make all the difference because the big firms have started to

realise that they need to do something to stop many of their most talented

staff leaving to find better opportunities. Recruitment is just one part

of this, but it does at least shed light on the culture of the

company.

Shell International, a company praised by Best for really selling its

culture, has constructed a department within its core organisation called

Shell People Services, with responsibility for managing the recruitment

process online. Cisco takes a different approach and hands each department

absolute responsibility for its own area of speciality, so that human

resources ’owns’ the employment pages, for example. But the ongoing brain

drain from big corporations to dotcoms and the rising expectations of

young staff, often still in their 20s, mean that bigger firms can no

longer expect to hang on to their star players.

According to Amory Hall, managing director of methodfive

(www.methodfive.co.uk), a New York web development company which moved to

the UK in August, the digital revolution has opened up an entirely new

kind of business culture, which is cutting through the core of traditional

British methods. As a consequence, Hall is convinced that corporations

have a long way to go before will they look after their people

sufficiently well to keep them.

”The culture of big firms is changing all the time,” he says. ”The big

accountancy and management consultancy firms know that they have to

re-appraise their business methods for the network economy and engage the

kind of structures which pass more responsibility and control down the

chain. A 25-year-old hot shot is not going to put up with a rigid,

top-down hierarchy that doesn’t have the flexibility to develop their

skills.”

Indeed, it’s the awareness of new opportunities that is causing talented

staff to move to areas where they can really shine. Suggest to Hall that

management gurus such as Peter Drucker noted the drain from big firms to

smaller ones years ago and he observes: ”That might well be true, but now

they’re not even considering the big firms, but are e heading straight for

the dotcoms.” That’s why firms such as Cisco have been putting so much

into their online recruitment. As Cisco attracts the best candidates by

providing the kind of opportunities and responsibility they’re looking

for, it sets up a positive feedback loop: good people attract more good

people. Perhaps this is why Cisco has one of the lowest rates of staff

turnover in the business (see panel, p31).

As demand for skills meets rising awareness of the salaries they can

command, job seekers and UK corporations have moved to job boards operated

by agencies. These sites provide much cheaper advertising rates compared

with traditional print media and drive a certain amount of traffic back to

corporate sites.

In the US, this has led corporations to use job boards as traffic

generators and an opportunity to extend their branding. According to last

year’s Electronic Recruiting Index for the US (www.interbiznet.com), smart

corporations are also attracting upwardly mobile candidates by funding

their training.

In much the same way, UK corporations are using job boards as a branding

opportunity to attract candidates with a certain profile.

For example, Top Jobs on the Net (www.topjobs.net), sells itself as the

leading site for corporate job advertisements because it enables companies

to establish themselves and then draw traffic to their own sites. The

explosive growth of agency business also sheds light on the kinds of

services that job seekers are looking for.

Giles Clark, chief executive of Stepstone (www.stepstone.co.uk), spent

around #3.75 million last year marketing his company in the UK and is

convinced that the market is only now beginning to take off. ”The UK

market is nothing like as developed as the Scandinavian market and Denmark

in particular,” he says. ”We’re finding that job seekers want to move from

country to country and that’s what the net can do for them. That’s why

we’ve got around 100 staff in most of our offices, which are all over

Europe.”

The internet opens up a world of opportunity for both job seekers and

employers. But companies have so far failed to exploit its full

potential.

Judging by the US, the next stage of online recruitment is likely to focus

on the bulk of the market - the passive job seekers. State-of-the-art

recruitment sites, rather like Cisco’s, could then actually do more to

stabilise staffing than undermine it. Greater movement in the marketplace

would encourage employers to take more interest in training and retaining

staff and providing them with the environment that will keep them.

ONLINE RECRUITMENT AGENCIES FACE TOUGHER COMPETITION

Online recruitment agencies are in for a rough ride this year. Rapid

growth, a changing marketplace and relatively established firms prepared

to spend significant sums threaten to undermine many of the smaller

independents.

Recruitment site Stepstone (www.stepstone.co.uk) spent around #3.75

million on marketing last year. Its chief executive, Giles Clark, says:

”Look to the US and you see a market dominated by one or two huge sites

and thousands of highly specialised ones. The same is going to happen

here.” In common with other agency sites such as Monster

(www.monster.co.uk), which spent #2.9 million last year on marketing, and

JobShark (www.jobshark.co.uk), which started in October, Stepstone is

principally a job board. This means that job seekers register their CVs

and preferences online; a client approaches the agency with a job, and the

site screens candidates to find the appropriate skills. They must then

choose to apply for the job themselves.

The agency market broadly has two models. One lists jobs online, much like

the classified section in any newspaper. These include Top Jobs on the Net

(www.topjobs.net) and, to a lesser degree, Stepstone. The other is the

agencies which apply electronic screening to match candidates with

jobs.

This is where managing director of Peoplebank (www.peoplebank.co.uk) Bill

Shipton and JobShark director Max Butti claim they can deliver a better

service. However, the boundaries between the two can be blurred.

For example, Stepstone is a job-board service which uses automated

electronic targeting.

Unlike matching and bridging services such as Monster, Top Jobs

concentrates on corporate job advertisements. This year, the company will

spend up to #3 million on marketing. The site currently lists 2,000 jobs

from some 250 UK corporate clients, including Dell, Microsoft and

Intel.

According to head of communications John McNeil, traffic is increasing

quarter on quarter by around 40 per cent. Like Stepstone, which carries

around 6,000 job listings, Top Jobs is also expanding across Europe.

McNeil believes that its greatest strength is its relationships with its

clients: ”By linking advertised jobs to their companies, we give our

clients the opportunity to extend their own branding. That’s something our

rivals have chosen not to do. What’s more, our software enables companies

to track jobs in real time and then make changes, which enables our

clients to manage their own advertisements.”

CASE STUDY: SIMPLICITY IS THE WATCHWORD FOR CISCO

Cisco Systems is growing fast: 40 per cent a year for a company with a

worldwide workforce of 25,000, of whom 3,000 are in Europe. Staff

retention is high, too: fewer than five per cent move on each year,

compared with most businesses which lose around 15 per cent.

The company says that the introduction of online recruitment has cut

hiring costs in the UK from around #7,500 to around #4,000 per person.

But according to Janet Huckvale, UK head of human resources, the real

strength of the system lies in its simplicity.

”It’s crucial to encourage job seekers to use the service and that means

making it easy to use,” she says. ”The first page shows you where to find

jobs and by using a key word search and fields to narrow down the process,

you can find jobs inside a few minutes.” By using a simpler form and

standardising the recruitment language to English, job applications can be

completed on Cisco’s web site in less than 20 minutes. Huckvale claims

that speed is everything, because Cisco has found that around 80 per cent

of job seekers apply for new jobs from their existing place of work.

In recognition of this, some cunning emergency features are included, like

a panic button which drops a screensaver on to the application page should

a manager be walking past. As Huckvale says: ”Potential candidates often

quit the application because they’re worried about someone finding out

what they’re up to at work.” Such tactics are clearly working: Cisco

receives 80 per cent of CVs through its recruitment web site - a figure

which rises to around 90 per cent for graduate applications.

Innovations like this have allowed Cisco to reduce the average time it

takes to recruit new staff by well over 20 per cent in the UK. However,

the company is also saving on marketing. Not only can it direct all

enquiries to the site, thereby saving on brochures, but it can also track

and screen potential candidates when they get there. By tracking the sites

a job seeker has visited immediately before and after visiting Cisco, the

company can place advertisements on those pages to drive greater

traffic.

CASE STUDY: Shell’s top job site

Shell employs some 100,000 people full-time and has a similar number on

contract from 60 different countries working all over the world.

The recruitment web site behind Shell International gets roughly 100,000

page impressions a day and 25 online job applications, mostly from

graduates.

The site (www.shell.com) typically has details of around 200 jobs. Shell’s

other job enquiries, more than 4,500 a year, go through the regional press

and associated sites, and 50 affiliated web sites.

In its report on top company recruitment web sites, IT consultancy Best

International gives Shell a good rating for striking the right balance

between information and navigation, and selling the work and culture of

Shell to prospective applicants. But according to recruitment manager Hans

Haringa, the site was never built to accommodate recruiting needs.

”The real strength of the site is its ability to communicate to

stakeholders and it’s been designed to engage web users on topical

issues,” he says. ”For example, following more controversial environment

issues, we decided to put a link into Greenpeace. But it was only when we

revamped the site about a year ago with more information on graduate jobs

and started tracking traffic that we discovered that between 20 and 25 per

cent of all site visitors were coming in solely to look for jobs.

After some research, it was decided to develop a recruitment portal, and

that’s what we’re going to do this year.” The first part of that process

has been to shift the site’s management from an external service to a

group inside Shell called Shell People Services.

This group has responsibility for running the site, but directs all

response handling to a unit in Manchester.

The graduate recruitment site (www.grad.shell.com), offers clear and

concise information on the work of the company, providing case histories

of what various candidates have achieved through working with Shell, but

doesn’t provide any deeper kind of profile.

However, it’s easy to find the company’s recruitment selection criteria

(described under the titles Capacity, Achievement, Relationships), and to

read up on the application process before submitting an application form.

However, there is no psychometric testing online.

This year, Shell expects to revamp the site to bring information on all

jobs from around the world into one place. However, Haringa does not

expect the site to become anything more than a job board. ”We’re not going

to follow the hi-tech model because that would mean having to re-engineer

the recruitment process,” he says.