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Introduction
Computers In Personnel sponsor independent research into targeted HR subject areas - to help focus our activities and to ensure we stay at the forefront of HR technology solutions provision.
We hope sharing our research with you helps you focus also. We have distilled the research findings down to 5 top tips but for those of you who are interested in the data behind it, we have more detail on each tip, and access to the full report and further resources.
Tip 1 : View your Recruitment as a Sales and Marketing Exercise
Tip 2 : Don't Fall Behind on Web-Recruitment
Tip 3 : Speed Up the Recruitment Process
Tip 4 : Market to the Talent your already know about
Tip 5 : Make Decisions on High Quality Recruitment Information
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Webster Buchanan Research conducted a survey among 100 HR directors and managers in the UK to analyse the different approaches organisations take to recruitment and the challenges they encounter. The project assessed a broad range of issues facing mid-sized and large organisations, from the shift to web-based recruitment and their overall recruitment philosophy, to the way they report on the effectiveness and business impact of their recruitment activities. |
Tip 1 : View your Recruitment as a Sales and Marketing Exercise
The responses reflected the growing belief that in a highly competitive market where talent is at a premium, organisations need to take an aggressive, professional approach to recruitment and adapt lessons learned from customer-facing functions such as sales and marketing.A huge majority of respondents – 85% - ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ with the following two statements:
• “Recruitment should be viewed as a sales and marketing exercise, not purely an HR administrative task. You need a good corporate image,
good marketing skills to identify the best candidates, and good sales skills to encourage them to join”
• “The professionalism of recruitment – from the design of your adverts and website to the way you respond to telephone enquiries – directly
influences candidates’ joining decisions”
In addition, 87% ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ with the idea that “HR should actively seek to learn lessons from colleagues in sales and marketing in order to improve recruitment effectiveness”.
Tip 2 : Don't Fall Behind on Web-Recruitment
The survey demonstrated an overwhelming appetite among interviewees for web-based recruitment and an expectation of significant growth. The vast majority of respondents – 86% - said they strongly agreed or agreed with the statement: “Over the next two years, my company will actively encourage applicants to abandon paper-based applications and apply for jobs over the web.”
Similarly, when asked to respond to the statement that “All candidates should be capable of applying for jobs online (rather than by mail or phone), and it is reasonable for companies to require them to do so”, 72% of respondents agreed.
Tip 3 : Speed Up the Recruitment Process
The proportion of respondents who seem to see no link between delays within the business and the potential to ease them through HR self-service. Questioned about whether line managers can post jobs themselves and/or track the progress of applications via self-service, only a quarter of respondents said they provide this capability today or plan to within a year. A further 31% plan to long-term – but that still leaves 43% with no plans at all. While other employee-centric HR disciplines may lend themselves more obviously to self-service, the ‘no plans’ figure is surprisingly high – after all, self-service allows managers to carry out administrative tasks directly, improves their information access and gives them better visibility into the progress of applications. There’s no better way of embarrassing people into action than letting them see what proportion of a process is eaten up by their own inactivity.
Tip 4 : Market to the Talent your already know about
There is a clear case for making internal jobs available to the talent you already have. Opening out their career options prevents you losing the knowledge and skills, reduces your need to hire from the 'unknown' masses and further incentivises the talent you have today.
Further to this, you should be keeping in touch with those that have expressed interest in joining your organisation, but as yet have not become an employee. By having the key information on them to hand, with technology to make maintaining traction simple.
Tip 5 : Make Decisions on High Quality Recruitment Information
An large proportion of organisations cannot speak with confidence about the metrics around recruitment. Recruitment reporting is still largely centred on HR-specific metrics such as time/days to hire, rather than business- centric measurements. Less than a quarter of respondents (23%) report on the direct cost of recruitment today, for example, and just 6% on indirect costs (e.g. in HR/line managers’ time) The total recruitment spend seems to be an illusive figure, and many more supporting metrics are ignored.
Increasingly organisations are starting to look to more data for the information they need to manage their huge recruitment spend. Time/days to recruit can be measured in more detail, looking at the time each agency takes to get their candidates to interview, how long hiring manages take to short-list, clearer comparison and source response of your PSL. Recruitment technology is enabling the forward thinking organisations to save, money, speed up the cycle, and most importantly make good decisions quickly.
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