Embrace the Web: Take the Hassle Out of Your Recruitment

By Dan Collins

The words ‘sourcing’, ‘interviewing’ and ‘hiring’ are enough to make most managers involved with recruitment want to face-palm, whilst fighting furiously to retain a professional exterior. You’re a specialist, an industry-expert, you’re good at what you do. Yet, every once in a while the bulbous monster of Recruitment decides it needs some attention, and you’re left trying to give it some brain-space whilst actually doing your job.

 

Ridiculously, this is one specialist area of business that non-specialists are meant to take on, run with alongside their real cost-generating concerns, and come out with smiling, having got exactly the right Joe Bloggs who is a perfect fit, aptly experienced, and a pretty nice fella to boot. But there’s a big avenue being under-used at present, which could make your life a good bit easier: the world of Online Recruitment. And it’s not scary and it won’t leave you wanting to face-palm, we promise.

If you’re lucky you might have some HR bods on hand, willing to guide and direct and take some of the leg-work out of the recruitment process for you. But even if you have, at the end of the day it’s you who knows the role you’re looking to fill. You know the nitty-gritty of what criteria are essential, and what are less important. You know the intricacies of your team, and that Margot just isn’t going to be productive if she’s got to hand-hold another new recruit who has no initiative, and despite saying they have 5 years’ relevant experience, in reality, don’t know which way is up. These are issues that can easily be eliminated at the recruitment stage, but how?

 

Online Recruitment – Candidate or Employer, It Matters.

Online Recruitment takes the marketplace of jobs and candidates and spreads the net wider and deeper. It doesn’t matter if you’re a candidate or an employer, if you’re not embracing web-based recruitment avenues, you’re as good as a dinosaur. And given they don’t have opposable thumbs, that’s going to leave you out in the cold. If you’re looking for the next stage in your career, you need to be internet-savvy, making sure your internet ‘profile’ (not just an individual Linkedin one) is up to date, seamlessly tells the correct professional story of who you are, what you’ve done and where you’re going. For employers, you need to realise that the best candidates are the ones who know this is the market-place of choice. The internet is where you’re going to find the best candidates at the lowest cost. Smart, financial sense. No face-palms.

 

What are the Benefits of Online Recruitment?

We’re going to focus on the Employer here. Online Recruitment, when utilised correctly and holistically, is indispensable. Once you’ve tried it, chances are you’re going to wonder what took you so long, and why you still insisted on getting that Milk Round Graduate Ad to deadline when you were in danger of cutting corners on a deal that actually paid.

1. It’s Hassle-Free: you get to choose your recruitment agenda, on a timescale and time-commitment that suits you. With 24-hour internet access, you can scope out applications in the five minutes you’re waiting on the platform, or in the 10 minutes of a meeting that doesn’t pertain to you. You don’t have to be physically sat at your desk wading through CV’s that are a complete mishmash of style making them difficult to compare.
    
2. A Wider-Market: by utilising Online Recruitment tools, you’ll be spreading the net to a far wider audience to a much deeper level. Yes, you may have always advertised in Warblers Weekly, but you may just find that your best twitcher was in fact reading Warblers Web that week. By using the internet, and accurate and efficient management of online Job Boards, posts spread and you get a far greater response. This may seem terrifying if you’re going to be the person to filter these, but with Online Recruitment, someone else - someone who’s a recruitment expert - does that bit for you. Meaning you get the cream of the crop.
    
3. Cost-Effectiveness: we can extol the virtues of hassle-free, risk-minimised recruitment, but at the end of the day, what really matters to your businesses’ bottom-line, and potentially your bosses agreement, is cost-effectiveness. For a fully inclusive online recruitment package, you’re likely looking at considerably less outlay and a far reduced overall cost of hire. What’s more, if you use the right Online Recruitment specialists, such as Net Recruit, who offer a Campaign Builder Tool, you’re going to know exactly what it’s costing you, from start to finish, before you even give the go-ahead.
    
4. Time-Effectiveness: everything web-based is real-time. No more waiting on publication lead times, no more waiting for snail-mail. Job postings are instantaneous and so are their responses. Filtering can happen automatically, the recruitment process simply becomes far more efficient and stream-lined.
    
5. No More Irritating Sales Patter: we all know the icy-finger of dread that creeps up when you see your caller-display flashes up the number of “Jack-I’m-So-Smarmy-Recruitment-Agent”. With online recruitment, you simply don’t have to listen to this anymore.
    
6. You can go snooping: the joy of the internet means you can take less of a chance of Joe Bloggs being a right royal nightmare who’s going to put a spanner in your proverbial crew. If they’ve done their homework correctly, you should be able to see professional consistency in their online persona that matches their individual application for your position. You have a wonderful first line of defence at your fingertips. You may also be able to view references before even contacting someone.

The benefits of Online Recruitment are enormous. The above is just a taster. For a detailed look at the real benefits, both in terms of time and hassle, take a look at Net Recruit’s useful and informative ‘Online Recruitment Explained’. It makes perfect sense to ensure that you get to keep on being the specialist money-earner that you are, whilst someone else saves you money on your recruitment strategy.

So, no more face-palms when you hear the words ‘sourcing’, ‘interviewing’, or ‘hiring’. Log on, and let someone else get your recruitment ducks in a row for you. You can include as much or as little in the online recruitment process as you like: from advert-creation to posting; first-line screening to telephone screening; interview processes to offer management. Don’t be a dinosaur and don’t make life harder for yourself, embrace Online Recruitment.

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