The Online Recruiting Revolution

There have been astounding changes and developments during the evolution of the staffing agency in its 50-plus years of existence. Traditionally, the biggest sector served by the industry has been administrative support. Though these support services are still in high demand, there has been a huge shift towards recruiting professionals in Finance, Sales, Engineering, Information Technology, and Management. Technology and economic advancements are largely responsible for this change in focus.

In the past, staffing agencies have relied on responses to the placement of newspaper and yellow page advertisements to drive their business. This approach would trigger large flows of resumes from candidates of all kinds. In turn an enormous administrative demand was generated to open, sort and categorize responses just to identify potential candidates. Now the industry has felt the impact of the Internet and its contribution to the recruiting process. It has been phenomenal.

To illustrate this point more poignantly, here are some interesting numbers to keep in mind. A survey revealed that the cost per new hire using job fairs, print advertisement, etc. is $3295. Compare that to recruitment done exclusively through the Internet at $377 per capita. Using the Internet as part of the recruiting process attracts top-flight candidates with higher levels of education, experience and technological expertise over those relying strictly on the older job search methods.

This wave of change really began to swell in February 1999. Since that time, traditional staffing agencies grew by approximately 7% per annum, whereas Internet recruiting has grown 150% during the same period. Therefore, it is crucial for firms to develop and implement strong marketing plans that integrate the use of these new interactive, electronic mediums along with more traditional recruiting methods.

Additionally, agencies have developed incentives to attract candidates such as sign-on and hour accrual bonuses, and a host of fringe benefits which until recently were out of the reach of the contract worker. So who are the primary targets of all of these efforts? Generation X (individuals born between 1965 and 1980) and Generation Y (individuals born after 1980). The former looks to the Internet as their job search tool of choice, and the latter choose the Internet as their only tool for the job hunt, which brings home the point that an Internet recruiting strategy is necessary.

Bottom line, there's a huge incentive for employers and recruiters alike to follow the trend towards online job board usage in the ongoing battle to save time, effort, and most importantly, money. For example, the turn around time for new hires can effectively be cut from two or more weeks to less than two days.

Gone is the era of coveting the solicitation and distribution of resumes, which were once viewed as proprietary information by staffing agencies, candidates and employers. Previously, a firm may have worked collaboratively with a few other agencies. Now hundreds of thousands of resumes are captured daily and placed on job boards, cross-posted through multiple channels, portals, search engines, and Usenet groups. Alliances forged between HR teams and the traditional and third party recruiters will become more and more vital to surmount the obstacles discussed above. As labor markets continue to contract, and staffing networks start to merge and develop partnerships, the entire human capital machine must be adept at retooling for maximum effectiveness. This will allow recruiters, employers and employees to stay competitive and successful in this new cyber world-order.