Online recruiting grows up

The first generation of online job recruiting was all about transferring print ads to the Web. But now, in what’s called the Web 2.0 era, the virtual element of recruiting is all about making connections and strategically massaging data to help uncover and research good leads.

Just look what employers in search of job candidates can now do:

Get their own workers to identify potentially good hires through online referral sites.

Place ads strategically on Google to catch the eye of passive job candidates.

More easily query professionals who are two, three, four degrees of separation away in online networks.

All this represents “the jelling of people, ideas and technology,” said Eric Puestow, staffing manager in Manhattan with Tommy Hilfiger, who attended last month’s electronic recruiting confab, ER Expo, in Boston. Some 300 recruiters and vendors gathered there to discuss the newest trends in identifying candidates and hiring.

Recruiting is usually done by an employer’s human resources department or by outside firms. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment/recruiting specialists held about one in four human resources-related jobs in 2002.

At this year’s expo attendance was up by 80 percent since last year, said David Manaster, president of the Electronic Recruiting Exchange, the event’s sponsor. Plus, the number of exhibitors doubled, he said, and recruiters themselves are in higher demand, with as many as 60 to 80 new job openings for recruiters showing up each month on www.erexchange.com.

Hiring increasing

This comes as hiring nationwide in the fourth quarter is expected to increase by 29 percent, according to research by Manpower Inc., a Milwaukee-based staffing firm.

The need today is to find “quality in a sea of quantity,” said Jason Goldberg, chief executive of Jobster.com, which is part job site, part referral site. Employers in search of that quality are asking their own employees and outside contacts to join in virtually and invite people they think would be good to sign onto the company’s “talent network” on Jobster for openings now or down the road.

A company’s own employees are seen as excellent sources because, after all, who is going to jeopardize his workplace reputation by referring a dud to his own company? (Employers also tend to adhere to the theory that good people associate with other good people.) Such referrals can help employers identify more viable candidates in the sea of resume spam. Last year, an average of 31.7 percent of new hires at 40 large, recruiting-savvy employers came from such inside referrals, according to research by CareerXRoads, a Kendall Park, N.J., employment-strategy consulting firm.

Job hunters also can benefit as they look for openings listed on Jobster. They can increase their chances if they have a friend at one of Jobster’s 150 client companies, including Starbucks, T-Mobile, Expedia, Cosi, Nordstrom, and Northrup Grumman. The job hunter writes in the name of the friend, who is then contacted by an e-mail asking for comment.

Another new referral site, H3.com, allows employers to offer cash rewards to employees and their contacts who refer new hires — with the money donated to charity if that’s what the middleman (or woman) prefers.

It’s clear that many of these tools are becoming more “relationship-based” and can make identifying candidates “less cumbersome,” said Michael Homula, director of talent acquisition at First Merit Bank in Akron, Ohio. But recruiters still need that personal touch, speaking face-to-face or by phone: “The best weapon is the 10- digit device on people’s desks,” he said.

Many skills required

Real success comes from “turning leads into candidates and candidates into hires,” says Donna McKenna, director of North America staffing for Arrow Electronics in Melville. Sure, a recruiter needs to be adept at choosing the right technology, but also at networking, screening, qualifying and closing the right deals with the right candidates.

Add to that, too, the skill of making the most of search engines, a skill called “search engine optimization.” Webhire, a Lexington, Mass.-based firm that helps employers with the hiring process, has just launched a service that helps clients target passive candidates, those receptive to a move but not actively looking for a new job.

Webhire purchases from Google certain key words searched for by people in certain geographic areas — the word “aneurysm,” for instance. When people search for information on aneurysms, a certain percentage of whom are likely to be medical professionals, a recruiting ad for a Detroit medical center will be displayed beside the search results.

Networking sites

Recruiters and job seekers are further empowered through such social networking sites as LinkedIn.com, which allows professionals to expand their online Rolodexes by linking to those of friends and colleagues. Indeed, LinkedIn has recently partnered with job search engine SimplyHired.com, so now job seekers who are LinkedIn members can connect to people working at a hiring company, people who have indicated a willingness to help. Profiles can be found, too, of the recruiter/hiring manager who posted the opening on the LinkedIn site, says Konstantin Guericke, marketing vice president.

Recruiters also can find and research prospective candidates on Zoominfo.com, which provides professional summaries — sliceable and diceable by title, employer, former employer, education, geography — all based on public information gleaned from the Web. Want to find people at the vice president level who at some point worked for Dell? Zoominfo can present you with a list of more than 600 names and summaries. If one catches your fancy, you can also find out who else worked there at the same time — a potential lead for behind-the-scenes commentary on the candidate.

Zoominfo also helps job seekers. They can research interviewers or prospective bosses, correct information in their own summaries, add details not already found on the Web, write their own summaries or ask that theirs be removed from the site altogether.

Such resources increase the digital reach of just about everyone on both sides of the job vacancy. And this means, says Guericke, all of us should consider being nicer to people at all levels of the workplace. Because whether we intend it or not, “every co-worker is now a potential reference.”

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