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After
surfing the websites of about 35 vendors, one of my associates in
Kingston, Washington bought a mailbox for her new home via e-mail from a
mom and pop distributor in Menomonee, Minnesota last week. That’s just
one example of how the Internet levels the playing field when it
comes to marketing and sales. Size and location have become all but
irrelevant because buyers can now compare products, services, and
pricing from every vendor with a web presence in just a few clicks of
the mouse. What
is being largely overlooked, however, is how the Internet can do the
same for smaller employers who are competing against huge corporations
– as well as one another – for the best of the nation’s limited
labor pool. I’m
not talking about just adding a button that reads “Employment
Opportunities” to your home page. While this tactic certainly
doesn’t hurt, it only produces reliable results for large, well-known
employers-of-choice like Southwest Airlines, GE, and Procter &
Gamble. People are drawn to these sites. If you’re not yet an
employer-of-choice in your community, you’ll have to be more proactive
and creative. I
believe there really are enough quality applicants out there for most of
the jobs that go begging today – yours included. Employers are just
letting good people slip through their fingers. I see it over and over
and over again. There are two shortcomings, two design flaws, that come
up in 99.9% of the recruiting system audits we do for employers large
and small in every kind of industry. The
first is that job applicants are treated as interruptions. Whether they
ask the convenience store clerk for an application or check in with the
receptionist in the Personnel Lobby, job applicants are seen as
interruptions that take us away from “more important” things. This
makes a horrible first impression – especially on the people who would
be the best kinds of employees. Employers continue to act as if they are
doing jobseekers a favor when in today’s market just the opposite is
true. The
second flaw is that employers make the application process difficult.
Most still expect applicants to come to them when it is convenient for
the employer – during regular business hours. When all the good people
who want to work are already working, this practice defies logic.
Electronic technology solutions, however, are open 24 hours a day, 7
days a week and allow working people to easily apply or get information
at their convenience. If
your recruiting system has one or both of these common flaws, check out
these e-ways to upgrade and get better results: 1.
Job Boards
– One of the most creative innovations on the Internet is job
boards. The earliest ones were developed to recruit information
technology talent and they turned the recruiting industry upside down.
As these types of websites proliferated, niche markets were addressed
and today you’ll find boards specializing in almost every industry and
level of professionalism – from entry-level hourly worker to CEO. I
just typed “job boards” in the Google search engine and it came up
with the first 10 pages of a total of 12,300 pages of job board websites
and information. Now that’s more than I need to know – you too
probably – so do a little informal marketing research and ask your
employees and people who are like the kinds of applicant’s you’d
like to attract what job boards they frequent. (For an idea of how these
recruiting sites work, visit www.cstorejobs.com or www.workrover.com.) 2.
Let Your Web Site Do the Work
– Another good way to use the Internet as
a recruiting tool is to design your regular recruitment advertising to
push jobseekers to your site to apply. In this way, your traditional
classified ad or flier or direct mail piece can be short and sweet. You
can user fewer words to simply get the people you’d like to attract
intrigued and then direct them to your web site for more information and
to read your sales pitch. Use the space to spell out your merits as an
employer, to differentiate yourself from competing employers, and to
convince the people you want to actually apply and then make it easy for
them to do so. 3.
Automated Job Hotlines
– If you don’t yet have a web presence or won’t
use your site for recruiting, look into taking applications by phone.
These automated, telephone-based recruiting and screening tools also
increase applicant flow by providing applicants accessibility to job
information 24/7. By using this kind of interactive voice response
technology, you can streamline and automate the recruiting and screening
process by phone just as well as you can by Internet. When
the first few steps of the recruiting process are automated via some
kind of electronic technology, the employer can present a consistent,
favorable image and applicant and employer alike save a tremendous
amount of time. For
more information about what’s available to employers (as well as
jobseekers) on line, one good place to start is the Internet Public
Library at www.ipl.org. (Established by professional librarians to
organize and simplify the search for information on the net, this is a
good tool to bookmark and use to simplify most any information search.) Once
there, go to the Reference Center, Business & Economics, Employment
section and the subcategory “Job Searching and Employee Recruiting.”
As well as providing brief descriptions of each resource, links to each
site will whisk you right to those of interest. Another useful
recruiting information and idea site is www.erxchange.com. It’s
understandable that the business community rushed to e-tailing first as
orders and sales are always a first priority. Now it’s time to get a
leg up on the worsening labor shortage by being among the first to make
the most of electronic opportunities to recruit the people you need to
make the products, offer the services, and interact with your customers. |
