Web Based recruiting
The Internet is changing our lives more and more
everyday. The biggest change is in the way companies are recruiting and posting jobs. They have been using the World Wide Web for Human resources ever since the start of the Web back in the 60's. The people that developed the Web had no idea of where it would be today or what it will be doing tomorrow. In this paper I will tell you about: current technology, who is using this technology, the benefits of it's use, the trends for this technology, what expertise are needed to build the system, and my personal experience with web based recruiting (Eric R Wilson1).
To begin with I want to talk about the current
technology. The technology for web based recruiting is focused on improving the speed of the recruiting process, specifically the time it takes for the company to get in touch with the job seeker. Some of the companies are actually increasing their online recruiting efforts by staying off the Internet. The latest solution for this problem is called "resume spidering". This latest technology is used to track down the newest resumes that are posted on the web then e-mail all of the potential candidates that fit specific criteria. This type of searching service is still in it's beginning stages and is starting to get more widely used (Tim Ouellette1).
Another trend or new technology in web based
recruiting is a change in the actual sites. Some of the struggling sites are not getting the number of recruiters they want, and are forced to make changes. With 100,000 web pages being posted everyday it is extremely difficult to get the amount of attention and notice that you want (Dick Oliver). The less successful sites are at a period where they have to sink or swim. And the changes that they have to make have little to do with technology and a lot to do with the ease of use, setup, and the speed at which a person can find a job (Tim Ouellette2). Another trend is that colleges are using the Internet to recruit new students (Fortune). These new practices are on the cutting edge and the people that know how to set up these sites that make the task of finding a job easy and maybe even fun (can you believe it?) are in great demand.
The next topic that I want to discuss is the people
that are using this technology (including the recruiters) and the people being recruited. Instead of asking, "Who is using web based recruiting?" we should be asking, "Who is not using web based recruiting?" With such an increase in the number of people that are being hired using the Internet it is no surprise that the number of services and companies using services is also on the rise. Some of the companies that offer recruiting service include E-Span (espan.com), Career Mosaic (careermosaic.com), IntelliMatch (intellimatch.com), Job Trak (jobtrak.com), and The Monster Board (monster.com) to name just a few. All of these companies are in a bitter struggle to gain easy to use web sites, get all of the job seekers, and to have more e-mail than all other companies. This formula has been used by some of the best recruiters on the Internet to make their companies grow and flourish. The people that are using the service to get a job can vary from a CEO to students seeking an internship. Not only are people that do not have jobs using this service but also people with jobs that are looking for promotions and positions in other companies (Eric R Wilson2).
With all of this new technology there are countless
benefits for the use of Internet recruiting. This service can allow one person to submit his or her resume to many companies all at one time, plus get job postings for the rest of the year. On the flip side if a company has a good site it can get many resumes to fill all of their current positions and any opening they have in the future. For example Silicon Graphics has managed to create a web site that can obtain 4,000 to 12,000 resumes each month (Samuel Greengard).
Another form of recruiting that is very important is
used by the Red Cross to get blood donations. This is an organization that has been around for over 100 years and has adapted to the new technologies in order to get what they need. The Red Cross puts announcements of blood drives and information about disasters on their web site in order to get better reactions to the disasters and keep the blood reserves high. This is a good way for the Red Cross to recruit for what they need. This form of posting service is important to everyone in the country (Rosemary Cafasso). With the constant changing of ideas of Internet recruiting the sky is the limit as far as it goes for the future.
With web sites recruiting specifically the development
of new company sites and (recruiting) services, it is hard to stay with the current trends. In the past, a company would use their "Web Teams" to make their sites. These teams would get any software or hardware that they asked for immediately. The company saw it as a necessity to get new employees and to compete with other companies. However this is all changing. The new trends are for web sites to become integrated into the companies overall planning for the company. And this forces the "Web Team" to go through bureaucratic channels in order to get new software and hardware (Jeff Walsh, Matthew Nelson). Some other trends are the universal goal of making web recruiting easier to use with quicker response time from employers and have the ability to keep all the records for future use. In order to stay on top of the newest or current technology you need skilled employees that know what they are doing (Eric R Wilson).
In order to make these sites you will need more than
just people with web site building skills. What you need to be able to do is take literally hundreds of thousands of possible jobs and perspective employees and match them together. This monumental task has to be performed by the "Web Team" which includes people in the IT profession and is controlled by the IT managers. They are responsible to keep on top of current web recruiting trends and to innovate new application for the Internet (Scott Wildemouth). Managers are also in charge of all the information which must come together in order to create one of these sites plus the complexity of all the inputs. It can take anywhere from two weeks to many years to make one of these sites (Eric R Wilson2). The demand for these people are so great that you can find a job in the IT field in all most any major company in the United States. I just made my first web site ever and I did it in one week. This site has a copy of my current resume, so you could say I made my web based recruiting site in under one week.
With all of this information at my fingertips, I
decided to see how easy it would be for me to find a job on the Internet. To begin with I created my own web site so I could put the address on my resume and a company could find more information about me and I could show a company that I know how make a web site. After that I went to one of the resume sites and did a search for technology in the city of Dayton and I got 195 "hits". After looking through these companies, I sent my resume to a few of them and have yet to get a response (I sent them less than a week ago). Next I went to career services at Wright State and did a search for an internship or co-op and found 10 to 15 such positions. Finally I did a search on Headhunter for Columbus positions and received over 550 prospective jobs (However after I looked at some of the jobs about 80% of the jobs required at least two years experience). It is not very hard to find jobs on the Internet; the hardest thing may be to decide which job to take.
Another form of web based recruiting that I did was
something called Digital Discoveries. This is a program that is sent out to prospective employees from local companies. Mine was sent from IBM, Sprint, and Anderson Consulting. All you need to do is fill out the corresponding information on the two-disk collection and then up-load the information to Digital Discoveries. The very next day I had two E-mails from local companies in Dayton and Troy. This was quite exciting to see results this quickly and made me feel that I would not have any trouble finding a job. Today it is easier than ever to find a job by either using older paper services or the newer and more widely used web based recruiting.
In conclusion, I feel that I have researched and
implemented many programs that use web based recruiting. I have discussed the technical side of these applications, who is using this technology, the benefits, trends, people that create these sites and my personal experiences with Internet recruiting. While writing this I have learned and gained valuable experience using web based recruiting. The last point that I want to re-mention is the fact that the use of the Internet is for everyone and anyone (even my self) can find a job on the Internet.
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