Introduction

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this Executive Diploma learners will be able to:

Examine key knowledge, techniques and tools required to undertake effective staff recruitment
and selection.

Apply the use the Internet, web based channels in addition to traditional ways to recruit staff.

Topics covered include:

 Intro to Online Recruitment and Selection

 A blueprint for recruiting on the web
 Tap your employee network
 Turn your alumni into recruiters
 Post jobs on your site
 Build a digital resume bank
 Grow candidate community
 Advertise your job openings
 Broadcast to jobseekers
 Narrowcast to targeted candidates
 Searching for passive candidates
 Find resumes on the web
 Find people linked to companies and colleges

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Assessment

The final assessment consists of 50 Multiple Choice Questions (“MCQ”) and is to be undertaken
within 1.5 hours.

The mode of assessment is a carefully designed MCQ. The MCQ will serve to validate the
attainment of broad understanding and application of knowledge of learners is related to the
intended learning outcomes.

The MCQ is uploaded on week 5 from the commencement week of the module and candidates
can attempt the MCQ at any time between week 5 – week 8.After week 8,candidates that have
not attempted the MCQ qill be considered as having failed the module.

Taking the Assessment

Depending on your mode of study, you can undertake your final assessment as follows:

For fully online learners, please log into the student portal and attempt the MCQ at any time
between week 5 – week 8.You are given a single attempt and you must complete the MCQ
assessment within 1.5 hours.

For Blended Learning learners, you can undertake a Paper based final assessment at the
Approved Learning Centre at the scheduled date and time coinciding with the same time as those
undertaking the Online assessment.

If you fail the first attempt, you will be afforded 2 further attempts without further examinations
fee(s) but beyond the 3 attempts, you will be required to register and pay an resit examination
fee.

All resit examinations have a separate calendar and if you had failed in the first attempt we shall
notify you accordingly on when the re sit will be scheduled.

The following grading scale will be used for all assessed elements:

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Mark Range Grade Classification

70% + A Distinction

60 –69% B Merit

50 –59% C Pass

< 50 D Fail

Free Online Learning and Research Resources For Business Students. Download this file

Files:
Free Online Learning and Research Resources For Business Students (4).pdfDownload this
file

3
 Session 1

Introduction to e Recruitment

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this session, you will be able to:

1. Define what is e recruitment

2. Trace the evolution or development and changing tasks associated with traditional
recruitment and e recruitment
3. Gain an understanding of the process and common tools used in e recruitment
4. Identify the advantages and disadvantages of e recruitment

1. Introduction

E-recruitment is a new technological mean for selecting one of the companies’ most crucial
resources, i.e. human resource. This technological innovation improves the process of recruiting
knowledge sources by using the Internet. It allows businesses to make cost savings, update job
offers and status at any time, to shorten the recruitment cycle time, to identify and select the best
knowledge potential out of a wider range of candidates and gives the company an opportunity to
improve its image and profile.

The precedent elements describe the possible improvements e-recruitment can generate, which
emphasizes the need for line and top managers to consider integrating this technology and
innovative process approach in their firm’s strategies. Furthermore, better and faster recruiting
can constitute a competitive advantage against enterprises from the same market.

4
However, web-based recruitment is now sufficiently widespread to represent a disadvantage for
companies that delayed its integration in their own corporate information systems and strategies.

Moreover, passive and active job seekers also tend to prefer online applications to traditional
application methods, because it saves time and money and makes it possible to browse through
a wider range of job offers. It also allows job hunters to navigate through the corporate websites
to build first impressions and opinions on the company (either because jobs offers are being
searched directly on the corporate website, or through links, or by personal incentive).

2. Definition of e or online recruitment

Recruitment is a core function of organizations, which consists in increasing the human capital to
pursue strategic goals. The traditional recruitment process is rather linear (see Figure 1) and
covers all activities regarding the identifying and hiring of potential knowledge held by individuals
(Holm, 2012). This process can be divided into three main phases, the attraction, screening and
selection of applicants (Bartram, 2000). The first phase is about identifying the potential
knowledge the company needs and attracting them in a large pool. The screening phase is about
filtering the applications and sorting out a smaller group of candidates, who fit the position,
according to key criteria considered crucial to the job profile. The final phase is about selecting
from the remaining applicants by conducting interviews and eliminating the candidates who fail to
meet the requirements of the recruiter(s) and head management.

5
Figure 1: The design and sequence of tasks in traditional paper-based recruitment process vs.
the (new) recruitment process using e-recruitment (Holm, 2012)

The use of Internet technology for recruitment has thoroughly changed the activities of a recruiter
(Dhamija, 2012). E-recruitment, which stands for online recruitment, can be generally
defined according to Kim & O’Connor (2009) as “any recruiting process that an
organization conducts via web-based tools”.

The E-Recruitment, also called as Online Recruitment, is the process of hiring the potential
candidates for the vacant job positions, using the electronic resources, particularly the
internet.

The process of recruitment is thus to be redefined when Internet support is used, and all three
previously mentioned phases of the process may become web-based. Here are examples of e-
recruiting activities and services: online job posting such as on corporate websites or job portals,
receiving of applications over the Internet, storage of these applications, screening applications,

6
online tests, response and status management (Singh & Narang, 2008). E-recruitment should not
be considered as a process itself, but more as a web-based assistance that must be integrated
into recruiting and selecting methods. A high integration level of e-recruiting is achieved when
parts of the online recruitment process are automated by a corporate information system. This
type of information system is called Human Resource Information System (HRIS) and is part of
the Electronic Human Resource Management (E-HRM). HRIS is an advanced system that allows
to support a company in every HR function such as recruiting both internally and externally, testing
applicants with web-based questionnaires and e-assessment methods, managing candidates and
employee’s information and providing meaningful decision support tools. (Dhamija, 2012;
Malinowski, Keim, & Weitzel, 2005).

3.0 Evolution of Recruitment Tasks

The addition of web-based tools to the recruitment process has brought a major evolution to its
role and activities. Maurer and Liu (2007) described this as a change from “batch mode” to
“continuous mode” that allows a firm to constantly collect and process information such as
entering job applications, status changes or statistical data. Furthermore, they claim the
introduction of e-recruitment methods enables a reciprocal communication facilitated by
Internet support which happens earlier than in the traditional recruitment process.

In fact, Internet has become a widely spread source for employment searches and job seekers
are also progressively using proportionally less of the traditional channels such as printed media
and employment agencies to turn towards online job advertising.

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The reasons for its success are numerous. First of all, job seekers achieve time and cost saving
when applying online, such as on corporate websites, job portals or professional networks. In fact,
there is no need to print a CV, a motivational letter, nor to send it. The entire sending action takes
no more than a few seconds, and since a computer with an Internet connection can be considered
a standard, the tools that are necessary for an individual to send an application online are already
available.

4.0Types of e Recruitments

The two kinds of e- recruitment that an organisation can use are:

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Job portals

What is a job portal?

A website dedicated to serving as an intermediary between job seekers and companies in the
selection process.

1. Applicants

Applicants must register if they want access to all services of the website or to all the information
regarding registered job vacancies.

•Their CV, collected through a questionnaire, becomes part of the database and is available to
business users.

•It is free.

•They provide an early warning system on the appropriate job profile, normally via e-mail, although
the most developed sites offer other options like the RSS.

•In some cases you may know the number of candidacies for a particular job and can keep track
of your own self-candidacy.

•It provides information on job searches, information on courses, etc.

2. The basic structure of the sites

•Search (basic and advanced) from a range of categories and / or words.

•Entry and access for registered users

•Access to businesses

•Featured offers(businesses have to pay a fee)

•Latest offers

9
•Thematic Channels: Ranking the offers based on criteria such as first job or occupational sectors.

•Additional information for job searches.

3. The most used

MONSTER (HTTP://MONSTER.COM)

Is absolutely the most used to choose which recruitment agencies website are available. The
most important thing that you need to know is which job level you are looking for. Anyway, most
of the recruitment agencies do publish vacancies on Monster too! therefore it is not unusual to be
redirected, from an application to a vacancy on Monster, to the website of the another recruitment
agency.

INFO JOBS (HTTP://WWW.INFOJOBS.COM)

It is the largest and most successful online Job Search in Europe and the career builder site.

EURES (HTTP://EC.EUROPA.EU/EURES)

Eures is the European network of employment services. This network offers information, advice
and support to the placement / recruiting, promoting contacts between job seekers and employers
interested in recruiting outside the country.

It allows the posting the position with the job description and the job specification on the job portal
and also searching for the suitable resumes posted on the site corresponding to the opening in
the organisation.

Creating a complete online recruitment/application section in the companies own website. –

Companies have added an application system to its website, where the passive job seekers can
submit their resumes into the database of the organisation for consideration in future, as and
when the roles become available.

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Resume Scanners

More and more companies are relying on technology to weed out job applicants at the initial stage
of the hiring process – using software that scans and screens resumes in what has become a
multi-billion dollar industry.

Resume scanner is one major benefit provided by the job portals to the organisations. It enables
the employees to screen and filter the resumes through pre-defined criteria and requirements
(skills, qualifications, experience, payroll etc.) of the job.

Job sites provide a 24*7 access to the database of the resumes to the employees facilitating the
just-in-time hiring by the organisations. Also, the jobs can be posted on the site almost
immediately and is also cheaper than advertising in the employment newspapers. Sometimes
companies can get valuable references through the passers-by applicants.

Online recruitment helps the organisations to automate the recruitment process, save their time
and costs on recruitments.

Online recruitment techniques

Giving a detailed job description and job specifications in the job postings to attract candidates
with the right skill sets and qualifications at the first stage.

E-recruitment should be incorporated into the overall recruitment strategy of the organisation.

A well defined and structured applicant tracking system should be integrated and the system
should have a back-end support.

Along with the back-office support a comprehensive website to receive and process job
applications (through direct or online advertising) should be developed.

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5.0 Advantages and Disadvantages of E-Recruitment

There are many benefits – both to the employers and the job seekers but the e-recruitment is not
free from a few shortcomings or limitations.

Advantages of E-Recruitment are:

a. Lower costs to the organization. Also, posting jobs online is cheaper than advertising in the
newspapers.

b. No intermediaries.

c. Reduction in the time for recruitment (over 65 percent of the hiring time).

d. Facilitates the recruitment of right type of people with the required skills.

e. Improved efficiency of recruitment process.

f. Gives a 24 X 7 access to an online collection of resumes.

g. Online recruitment helps the organisations to weed out the unqualified candidates in an
automated way.

h. Recruitment websites also provide valuable data and information regarding the compensation
offered by the competitors etc. which helps the HR managers to take various HR decisions like
promotions, salary trends in industry etc.

Disadvantages of E-Recruitment:

Apart from the various benefits, e-recruitment has its own share of shortcomings and
disadvantages.

Some of them are:

1 Hard to target – often, with online recruiting, it can be difficult to target a specific group of
candidates without having your job post seen by many others who will likely apply to the vacancy
and waste your time.

2 Cost – depending on the online platform you use, you may have to pay a subscription fee or
other costs in order to post your vacancy.

12
3 Difficult to measure effectiveness – when implementing several online recruitment strategies, it
can be difficult to measure the effectiveness of each.

4 Informal – with regards to social media recruitment, some companies find that it gives off the
wrong image for them as it is an informal recruiting method.

5 Large response rate - by posting a job in an industry trade journal, you can almost guarantee
that the applicants will be relevant and not time wasters. Posting online however will increase the
chances of getting hundreds of job applications, most of which may not even be applicable!

Learning Activity 1

Read the following uploaded notes:

1. Article on e Recruitment
2. 402 PDF: E Recruitment: Is It Delivering?

Learning Activity 2

Go through the following PowerPoints:

1. Online Recruitment and Selection

2. E Recruitment
3. E Recruiting-NTU

Learning Activity 3

View the following videos at:

1. The recruitment process at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJNcYZvToGY

2. Recruitment has Changed - Online Recruitment Software at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4s0aaX6pUs

3. Online Recruitment Problems at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvsqqxYwhaw

4. Digtal E-Recruitment Process at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v780wqrbNGM

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Learning Activity 4

Visit some of the following job websites:

1.Directgov - the official job centre website which is user-friendly with good search options
including filters for date added, pt/ft, temporary / permanent and search radius

http://jobseekers.direct.gov.uk

2. Reed - lots of jobs with good search facilities, including location, job type, sector, salary and
date added

http://www.reed.co.uk/

3. Total Jobs - another good one with thousands of jobs and good search facilities

http://www.totaljobs.com/

4. NHS Jobs - simply the first place to go for NHS jobs, you can save, manage and view your
applications online

http://www.jobs.nhs.uk/

5. The Guardian - the best of the national newspapers

http://jobs.guardian.co.uk

6. TES - great for education jobs

http://www.tes.co.uk/jobsHub.aspx

7. Monster - good search options, easily choose to only view most recent job posts

http://www.monster.co.uk/

14
8. Everyjobsite - a relative newcomer that does a good job of collating the results from other sites
in an easy to use format

http://www.everyjobsite.co.uk

9. Jobsite

http://www.jobsite.co.uk/

10. Fish4Jobs

http://www.fish4.co.uk/jobs/

15
 Session 2

Blue print for Recruiting On The Web

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this session, you will be able to:

1. Have an overview of the blueprint( total process) in undertaking effective online

recruitment
2. Examine the various good practices and avoidance of common mistakes made by
companies when undertaking online recruitment.

1. Introduction

Recruitment is the most important component of a successful workplace. You can have the best
products or the best services, but without the right hires your business will simply struggle, and
the better your hires are the greater opportunity you have to compete in today’s competitive
economic environment.

Businesses both small and large need to learn how to recruit better, and the time spend learning
how to recruit top talent to your organization, the better your return on investment and the more
you’ll be able to profit from your decisions. The following sections provides the guide designed
for anyone that is looking to understand the recruitment landscape better and what it takes to hire
the perfect employees for your company via the Web.

Within this guide, you’ll learn what it means to identify the perfect candidate. You’ll learn how to
find candidates and attract them to your company. You’ll learn how to manage candidates and
grow your business using tools that are designed to both improve productivity and create a steady
flow of talent.

Within this guide, you’ll learn information such as:

 Where and how to advertise your job on the web.

16
  How to brand your business as an excellent work environment.
 How to interview candidates and recruit them to your company.
 What you need to do to ensure new hire success and more.

This guide is by no means comprehensive, because the recruitment process is always growing
and the needs of your company dictate how you hire and what you can do to make sure that
you’re hiring the best of the best. But the goal of this guide is to ensure that you’re well on your
way towards identifying and recruiting the best possible candidates for your company so that your
company can continue moving forward and growing.

Step 1: Identifying the Perfect Candidate

Before you can start hiring, you need to learn how to identify the perfect candidate. Surprisingly,
very few businesses take the time to truly identify the perfect candidate. Most have a vague idea
of what’s needed and what’s not, but companies that take the time to genuinely consider what is
needed to perform at your workplace will be the ones that will find those candidates.

Common Mistakes

Most companies only think about the simplest idea of the perfect employee for an open position.
For example, perhaps they need someone that programs PHP, so they advertise for someone
with 3 years PHP experience. In theory, you can still find the perfect employee, but in practice
this can lead to common mistakes, including:

17
 § Ignoring Great Candidates – Depending on the position, do you really need 3 years of PHP
experience? Do you need any other coding knowledge? Would you turn down someone that
was self-taught, or would you reward someone that had a college degree but no practical
experience? Without a true idea of what you want, you could be ignoring someone that meets
your needs.

§ Poor Advertising – Great applicants often apply to jobs they know they can get. They know
that they’re desirable already, so they have little need to apply to jobs that ask for skills they
don’t have, or experience they haven’t developed. You need your job advertisement to be as
accurate as possible for the perfect candidate, and until you’ve developed that perfect
applicant profile you may not know what it is you’re truly looking for.

Remember, it’s not just what you need but also what you don’t need. Perhaps a self-taught
individual with no college experience that can prove they have the knowledge would be just as
good or better than someone with years of experience. Or perhaps you are looking for someone
that you can train, and you’d prefer to work with an individual with more work experience so that
the transition to the corporate environment is more seamless.

There are many different considerations to make when deciding on what makes the “perfect
candidate.” But it’s an important exercise, because it will drive decisions that you’ll make later and
affect who will apply to your advertisements.

What to Do – Write a Profile of the Ideal Candidate

Before you open the position, write up a profile of the ideal candidate. In this profile, identify the
things that are important for the role. Be realistic. Ask yourself what you really need, what you
don’t need, what you can train in easily, what you cannot, and more. Map everything out.

If possible, have other people map these out as well. Look for things like personality expectations.
What is the person probably like? Think about them in terms of personality, the other jobs they
may apply for in other fields, and the many different potential qualities you need in an applicant.

18
Why it is So Important to Profile Your Candidates

Profiling your candidates will help you find and develop strategies that will target them more
successfully. Imagine what you can do if you’ve perfectly identified the best candidate for the role.
You can:

 Figure Out the Best Way to Reach Them

When you’ve identified the best candidate, you’ll know how to reach them. For example,
companies that advertise through Employment Office have access to websites such as
nfpjobs.com.au, bluecollar.com.au, traveljobs.biz, and more – these are niche job boards that
appeal to those that are looking in those areas. Identifying the perfect candidate means you’ll
know exactly where to look and where to target when you start advertising, and you’ll be able to
figure out how to make sure the best candidate will see the ad.

 How to Talk to Them

It’s not just about how to reach them either. Once you’ve figured out where they are, you want to
attract the best applicants to your job description. Remember, there are employees that you wait
for and employers you go out and get. You want the latter, and that means that you need to take
the time to figure out how to craft a job advertisement that speaks to that perfect employee.

 How to Choose Recruitment Tools

Of course, you cannot always identify the perfect candidate by resume alone, and you are likely
to get hundreds of applications from those that are not necessarily perfect candidates. That’s why
you’ll also need to know the person’s profile in order to select the right recruitment tools. For
example, is it the type of position that is going to require a background check? What about skills
testing or reference checking? What about some type of intelligence or “hard working” test? These
answers come from understanding the profile of the ideal applicant.

Your Perfect Candidate is Out There

There really is such thing as the perfect candidate, and with millions of job seekers (and millions
more employed individuals willing to leave for a better job), statistically there is going to be a
perfect new hire somewhere that you’ll be able to reach, impress, and hire.

19
But before you can figure out who that candidate is, you really need to take the time to develop a
profile and figure out what that person is like, and what you’re genuinely looking for.

Step 2: Where to Advertise Your Job Once You Have a Candidate Profile

As discussed in the previous section, your ideal candidate profile is everything. It will help you
figure out how to identify the perfect candidate, how to write in a way that reaches them, and of
course – how to advertise your job.

Advertising your job effectively means two things:

 Getting it out there to as many people as possible.

 Ensuring that your ideal candidates are within that reach.

You don’t want to reach only one or two people, but you also don’t want to reach a million people
only to have your ideal candidate be 1,000,001. You’ll want to find the right balance, where you
try to get your job posting out there for people to see and apply to, while also making sure that
you’re advertising in the areas that the people you want to apply for the job will see it.

Examples of Places to Advertise Your Job

 Social Media

Social media is easily the best and most convenient way to advertise a job. That is because social
media is free, simple, and you can reach out to others that will repost the job themselves.

20
For example, if you have an open position for a landscape contractor, you can not only Tweet out
your job or share it on Facebook – you can contact other Twitter users, have them retweet it to
their followers or share it to others, and make sure you get the applications you need.

With LinkedIn and industry-specific social media also available, your ability to reach out to a wider
audience for free is unparalleled with social media. You can even target candidates directly and
ask them to apply, and chances are they will if you’ve proven you care enough to reach out to
them.

If you want to reach even more people through social media, platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn
and Facebook all offer paid advertising. This allows you to target potential candidates based on
location, demographics, job title, level of education etc.

You can read more about paid Facebook advertising here.

21
Easy and effective Facebook Adverts

With Facebook Adverts, you can create targeted adverts to reach different audiences and meet
your business goals.

More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook to connect with what matters to them, and more than
1
900 million visit every day. When you run a Facebook Advert, you choose the audiences that
see it by location, age, interests and more.

With Facebook Adverts, you choose the type of people you want to reach and we deliver your
adverts to them. This makes your adverts more relevant for the people who see them, and brings
you real results.

See Facebook Advert targeting options.

22
Where they're active and engaged

Mobile devices are now part of our lives – people use phones and tablets to discover,
communicate and shop more than ever.

More than 700 million people visit Facebook every day on their phones and tablets – and when
they do, they see Facebook Adverts along with stories from family and friends.2 Because
Facebook Adverts are placed in the stream of information people view on Facebook, they're more
likely to see your adverts and take action.

How people see Facebook Adverts.

For real business results

Advertising on Facebook is easy for you and your customers. From a Facebook Advert, people
can get directions to your shop, download your app, view your videos, add an item to a shopping
basket or take another action on your website.

We'll actively update you on how your Facebook Adverts perform and how your budget is spent.
You can also visit Adverts Manager, our tool for managing your adverts and checking their
performance. And when you're on the go, there's an Adverts Manager app, too.

23
Measure the results of your Facebook marketing.

Run an advert for as little as

RM 5

Learn more about advert pricing

Set your budget.

Whether you set a daily limit for one advert or the total amount for a campaign, you're in control.

 Online Job Boards

Job boards are perhaps the most common place to advertise. Job boards are large, well marketed
websites that are widely known to job seekers. Examples
includeCareerOne.com.au, CareerBuilder.com, Seek.com.au, and many others.

24
Hello.

Sign in to find your next job.

Post Jobs

Sign In

Sign Up

 Home

 Add Resume

 Browse Jobs

 Explore Careers

 Search Resources

25
  Looking to Hire?

 Post Jobs

Top of Form

Search

Location

Find Jobs

Bottom of Form

Find the right job.

Right now.

Top of Form

Search

Location

Find Jobs

Bottom of Form

Recent Searches

No Recent Searches

26
Add your resume and let your next job find you.

Add Your Resume

Employers are using these keywords to search for candidates:

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Quick Links

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Saved & Applied Jobs

Saved Searches

Profile

27
Job Recommendations

No job recommendations yet, but opportunity is out there!

To start getting recommendations, upload a resume or complete a job application.

Popular job searches

By Category

 Sales
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Browse All Categories

Online job boards are useful for reaching a broad audience. They are not always the best choice
for targeting your online advertisements, and in some cases they can have one big drawback:
they provide you with too many resumes, making it difficult to find the ones you want. They are
also used too often by other companies, and in recruitment if you do everything the same way
your competitors do, you’ll hire the same people.

Nevertheless, they are easily available and a great place to showcase your advertisements.

 Niche Job Boards

Basic online job boards, however, are not specific to the job or the potential applicants. Your
applicants are likely to be looking at niche job boards that are tailored to their industry, because
they’ll have more faith that those putting applications into niche job boards understand their
industry and really want someone like them.

28
With niche job boards like nfpjobs.com.au, bluecollar.com.au, traveljobs.biz, we noticed that the
jobs in the niche job boards would receive better applicants than the same jobs on all-job job
board. Why? Because applicants were looking for those that wanted THEM. The niche job boards
were more attractive to quality applicants because they knew the employers knew what they
wanted and were specifically asking for it in a place that focused on that specialty.

Niche job boards still get a lot of less qualified applicants, but they are also more likely to attract
the very qualified applicants, and so they can often represent an even better location to advertise
your job.

29
30
  Google Adwords

Another way you can advertise is with Google Adwords. This is where you pay Google for clicks
when people search for keywords in your industry. Because you have your candidate profile, you
can also consider paying for keywords that are relevant to the person that is searching, even
though they are not necessarily related to the job.

Google Adwords, and other Pay-Per-Click advertising services, can help your job application
thrive. You create a job and post it somewhere, ideally your own website. You then create an
account with Google Adwords, and use your candidate profile and the job description to guess
what your ideal candidate is going to search for.

For example, perhaps you have a job in Sydney in IT. Your candidate may search for things like
“Sydney IT Jobs” or “Sydney PHP Programmer” or “Sydney Help Desk Support Open Position.”
You can figure out what search terms your ideal candidate will use, and then you’ll show up for
that search in the advertising space on Google. You’ll be able to ensure that your ideal candidate
will have an opportunity to click on your job description, and you’ll only have to pay for those that
click on ad.

Google Adwords is not a perfect system and involves a lot of guessing and trial/error. But the
more you use it, the more you’ll be able to immediately target potential employees and send them
to your own website in order to collect their applications.

Learn more about Google Adwords here

Get your ad on Google today

Be seen by customers at the very moment that they’re searching on Google for the things you
offer. And only pay when they click to visit your website or call.

31
Start now

Free expert support:

1800 988 571

Why Google AdWords?

Attract more customers

Whether you’re looking to bring in new website visitors, grow online sales, get the phones ringing
or keep customers coming back for more, Google AdWords can help.

Reach the right people at the right time

Your business gets found by people on Google precisely when they're searching for the things
that you offer.

Advertise locally or globally

Target your ads to customers in certain countries, regions or cities – or within a set distance from
your business or shop.

32
If you need us, we’re here

Google AdWords lets you manage your campaign by yourself, or you can call us for free expert
support on 1800 988 571.

Learn more about the benefits

You only pay for results

No visit, no fee

Signing up for Google AdWords is free. You only pay when someone clicks your ad to visit your
website, or calls you. In other words, when your advertising is working.

Start with any budget

How much you invest is up to you. Just begin with a daily budget that you're comfortable with,
then adjust as you go. Many businesses get off to a good start with a budget of at least $5 a day.

Learn more about costs

Easy-to-read reports and graphs show how your ads are doing in Google AdWords

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Finding the Right Places to Advertise

Where you advertise has a very substantial effect on the quality of your advertisements. While
you can, in theory, find the perfect candidate anywhere you post if you’re lucky, the best
companies know how to increase those odds and the better you advertise your jobs the more
likely you’ll get those amazing applicants you hoped for.

Step 3: How to Write the Job Ad

So you have your candidate profile and you’re ready to create your job. Now you have to make
sure you create the job in a way that appeals to that profile.

Before you create your job ad, there are a few things to note:

 Your job advertisement may not be static. You may need to change it often, especially
if you’re posting on multiple sites that represent multiple people. Just like applicants
are instructed to consider changing their resume to appeal to the company they’re
selling to, so too should you consider changing the job ad to help attract people in
different markets.
 Your job advertisements needs to consider what you really need, and what you really
don’t need. Remember, for every “qualification” you ask for, you’re potentially telling
a great employee “I don’t want you.” For example, if you say you require 3 years of
experience, but a perfectly qualified individual only has 1 year, they may not apply
even though they’re perfect for the role. However, you also don’t necessarily want to

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 make it too broad, because if you genuinely need someone with 3 years of experience
you do not want all of the 1 year individuals applying.
 Your job advertisement needs to brand your company as a great employer. Figure
out what you can say that will make people want to work for you. Focusing only on
what you need and not emphasizing why someone want to apply to your job will turn
off some people that know they’re valuable talent.

You don’t necessarily want your job ad to be just like everyone else’s. You want it to be uniquely
written for you, and given the proper care and attention necessary to ensure that you’re going to
get the applicants you genuinely want.

Base Your Job Advertisement on the Candidate Profile

Your job advertisement needs to be written with the candidate profile in mind. Try to figure out
what key words and phrases the applicant is looking for when they are applying to the job. These
are going to be tailored to each industry, and they need to consider all of the potential keywords
the applicant is looking for.

For example, in the world of online marketing, there are a lot of terms for roughly the same
techniques (just a different emphasis), such as “SEO,” “Content Marketing,” “Inbound Marketing,”
and “Online Marketing.” Your ideal applicant may be someone that is looking for only one term,
like “Inbound Marketing,” and if you use the term “SEO” you may not get this applicant to apply.

Attention to keywords is very important. Most job ads can be found via keyword searches, so you
want to make sure that you have the keyword that your ideal applicant will use, otherwise they
may not find your job ad. Even if they do find your job ad, the right keywords tell an applicant
“that’s me!” and make them want to apply to the position.

Of course, it’s not just keywords about the position either. Your ideal candidate may want to see
words like “Company Car” or “Merit Raises Available” or “Ability to Work From Home.” If that’s
what your ideal candidate is looking for and it’s something you can offer, it should be considered.

Your candidate profile should drive every decision you make, because your candidate profile is
your ideal candidate. Make sure you’re applying that profile to the entire description.

Starting Off – A Good Headline

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It starts off with a good headline. Headlines are often all that someone will see, and if you’re trying
to get the attention of a potential applicant, that headline needs to really speak to them. Headlines
should have the following qualities:

 Keyword – Ideally, the headline should have the most important keyword that you’re
hoping the perfect candidate is looking for. Often this is part of the job or job title, like
“Inbound Marketing Coordinator,” where the title has the position that the ideal
applicant is likely looking for. But it may not. You’ll have to carefully consider your
headline.
 Great Title – Your job title will also attract better applicants. Specific, valuable
sounding job titles can vastly increase the amount of respondents you receive – for
example “Marketing Assistant” will sound worse than “Marketing Associate” or
“Marketing Director” or “Senior Marketing Analyst.” If you want to get valuable talent,
a great title may be what you need.
 Perk – You should also see if there are any perks you can show in the title that make
people want to click. Examples include “Flexible Hours,” “6 Weeks Vacation,” or “Free
Gym Membership.” These are perks that will draw people to learning more about your
job and your company. Any perk that you share will brand your company as one that
cares about rewarding employees.

Job titles should not be very long, but they are a chance to increase clicks and get interest in your
job. Here are two different job titles to show the difference between a good and bad title:

Bad: “Telemarketer/Appointment Setter Wanted”

Good: “Customer Service Specialist Needed for High Paying Career. Flexible Hours!”

The difference between these two is pronounced, and the latter will draw in more potential talent
despite both jobs being the same.

Writing Your Job Description

Of course, you’ll still need an awesome job description, and that’s where it becomes a bit harder.
Every single job is different, and your employee profile is different as well, which means that your
great job ad may look nothing like someone else’s great job ad, because their ad was written for
a completely different audience. However, a great job ad should have the following qualities:

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  Positive Energy – When someone reads your job description, they should feel
excited. They should see that you’re excited to have them. Anything you write should
be brimming with positive energy, so that others are excited to work for you as you
are to have them.
 Background of the Company – Whether you’re a well known name or not, let people
know about your company, including what you do, any successes you’ve had, and
possibly even the rough number of employees or upcoming advancements.
 Excellent Formatting – People scan. You should make sure that your job description
is very easy for someone to scan and get an idea of what’s expected. Remember
bullet points, subheadings, and bold whenever it’s valuable.
 Realistic Needs and Qualifications – Using your candidate profile, figure out exactly
what you need (and what you’d like but don’t need) and place those in easy to read
bullets. As discussed in the previous chapters, make sure that you’re certain about
your needs – the skills you absolutely want, and none of the ones that you don’t.
 Pay and Benefits – You’ll also want to clearly entice people to your career. “Pay
commensurate with experience” or “competitive pay) may be too broad to attract the
applicants you’re looking for. Applicants are looking for an answer to “why you?” and
clearly defined (and excitedly written) information about pay and benefits can really
help you.
 Call to Action – So now you’ve gotten their attention. Tell them where to go. Excite
them to apply. Tell them what to send, and make sure that they’re given exactly what
they need to apply for the job.

Individual jobs will have many differences, because a factory worker isn’t going to have the same
language or information as someone looking to be the executive at a technology company.
Nevertheless, these keys should always be there, to ensure that you’re creating a job ad that
attracts the employees that are going to make a difference at your company. When you
do recruitment advertising , you pay special attention to how these job ads are written to make
sure they’re getting applicants.

Common Mistakes

In a moment we’ll show you some examples of good and bad job ads. But before we do, let’s go
over some of the common mistakes that people make with their job advertising:

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  Pompous Writing – Many companies already feel that job seekers should want to
work for them, and that if they get hired the company is doing them a favour.
Companies need to earn great talent, not vice versa, so make sure you’re not writing
in a pompous style.
 Extraneous Qualifications – Many companies also throw in qualifications that aren’t
necessarily needed. For example “experience with Microsoft Powerpoint” for a job
that doesn’t use PowerPoint. You should always make sure that you’re only listing
what an employee truly needs, because otherwise a great applicant missing a “skill”
that they don’t need may not apply.
 No Details About Company or Benefits – If you post a job with only details about
what you need, you’ll probably get a lot of applicants. But you won’t get the right
applicants. You’ll get resume spammers that want to send in an application to you
because you’re available, but not the top tier talent that are carefully considering their
options.

So keep these ideas in mind when you’re writing your job ad. There are definitely examples of
good job ads and bad job ads out there, and you need to be certain of your audience and the
applicant you are trying to attract when you list a job opening.

Step 4: How to Keep on Top of the Applications

Once you have a job ad up, you’re likely to get applications – and lots of them. In fact, highly
competitive jobs that are well advertised can get as many as 1,000 applications, and it’s not
uncommon at all to get at least 100 if your job is in visible places and many people “qualify.”

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Indeed, in the age of the internet, “resume spam” is a very serious problem. On major job boards,
especially, many people will not even read an application. Most will simply send in a resume to
any job that vaguely resembles the job they are qualified for, and then they’ll cross their fingers
and hope that something comes of it.

So while your candidate profile is there to describe the right applicants, and your excellent job ad
should attract them to your company, you’ll still have to stay atop of all applications to ensure that
you’re identifying those great applicants and rating them accordingly.

Why to Have a System

In order to keep on top of applicants, you should have a system. There are many benefits to
creating some type of candidate management system. A small sample of these benefits include:

 Missing No One – If you’re filing applicants and reviewing them accordingly, you’ll
never miss the perfect applicant.
 Additional Talent – Candidate management systems allow you to locate additional
talent and consider them in the future. You may find someone that could help your
company in a way you hadn’t considered, or if someone in your company leaves you
don’t have to start from scratch replacing them.
 Organisation – Your company has to appear professional as well. Correctly calling
candidates, identifying the ones you want, and keeping track of contact is crucial.

Candidate management systems are a great way to ensure the recruitment process isn’t
overwhelming and pays you back a great deal over time. They are the key to excellent
organization within your company, with both short and long term benefits.

Candidate Management Systems

Candidate management systems vary in functionality. Some small businesses that do not have
many applicants for open positions may opt to use a simple program like Excel. Simply create a

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template that contains information like name, phone number, application date, important
information on the resume, etc., and fill in the names you receive at the bottom.

Other companies that need a more advanced software should look into something like SCOUT.
These types of candidate management systems have tools that make recruitment easier, such
as:

 Job portals for applicants.

 Ranking ability.
 tatus and workflow systems.
 Smart forms.
 Calendaring features.
 Reporting capabilities and more.

Candidate management software makes it possible control all components of recruitment, thus
creating a more streamlined workflow that can help your company manage any number of
applicants you receive with greater efficiency and thoroughness.

Filters and Scanning Software

If you have the tools, you can also consider creating filters and ranking systems that will help you
filter candidates quickly – especially valuable for high profile, high application jobs, where you
need to make sure you’re identifying the candidate’s quickly.

Programs like SCOUT already have their own features to handle this installed. But if you work
with someone in IT and they have the time, you can also have them develop search and reporting
features that will help you filter through candidates at a much faster speed, and make it easier to
identify the best applicants without much additional work on your part.

Doing so will allow you to analyse more applicants faster, and while it can be a bit difficult to
creating a filtering system from scratch without help (otherwise you could accidentally filter out
great candidates), a well-designed filter system can help you save countless hours and spot
candidates that you desperately need.

Keeping on Top of Applications

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Every application matters, because even less qualified applications could be valuable for your
company, and because you never want to accidentally skip over the best applicant because you’re
too rushed or busy. Your ability to manage applications and create a pipeline of talent in your
organization is going to be the key to finding the best applicants.

Step 5: How to Choose the Right Applicant

At this point in the recruitment process, you have now begun to collect applicants. Maybe you
have already collected all of the applicants and you are now reviewing them. At this point it’s time
to start the decision making process.

That can be a difficult task. Companies often hired to provide shortlisting services because
reviewing multiple applications can take days, sometimes even weeks, and going through each
one with an objective eye is tough when you’re reviewing one after the other.

Choosing the Right Applicant is Tough

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There are many reasons that choosing the perfect applicant is difficult. One is simple – biases.
It’s extremely important you do not go with gut feelings because gut feelings are often based on
a person’s own subjective beliefs and experiences, and not objective analyses.

Some of these are more obvious. A study conducted a few years ago in the US showed that when
an employer receives two identical resumes, and one has a generic, stereotypical white male
name (e.g. John Smith) and one has a stereotypical black name (e.g. LaShonda Jackson), the
“White” resume is more likely to get call backs by a substantial margin. That’s a bias.

But not all biases are so obvious. You may feel as though the confident go-getter is the best
applicant when in reality the shy intellectual is the best applicant. Your gut may be that the
individual that used Calibri font in their resume is a better hire than the one that used Times New
Roman. You may be right, but you also may be wrong. You also almost certainly do not want to:

 Hire Without Testing – You’ll want to do background checks, check references, and
perform searches to learn more about a candidate. Interviews alone and “gut hires”
can go terribly, because how someone acts at the interview is often not at all like how
they act as an employee.
 Skip Over a Contributor – Talent is talent, and the best businesses know that it’s
not about where someone comes from but whether or not they can contribute to your
industry. You do not want to skip over someone that could be well qualified just as
much as you do not want to hire the wrong person.

Indeed, it’s all about not hiring the wrong person. There are significant costs involved to making
that kind of mistake. When you hire the wrong person, you lose:

 Thousands in Training Time – Even if you catch that you hired the “wrong person”
early, you’ll still have wasted weeks of training time and weeks of hiring to get that
person in the obvious. Rarely does any company realize someone was the wrong hire
from the beginning.
 Thousands in Lost Production – In addition, very few companies have enough tools
available to know if someone is the “wrong hire” for years, and most early progress
reporting tools are unlikely to be accurate because it takes a while for an applicant to
get settled.

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  Lost Talent – The talent that you missed out on because you hired the wrong person
is also going to go to a competitor. That means that they’re getting the production that
you could have received, and losing out even further.

If you’re like most companies, you also rarely, if ever, get rid of a less productive employee. That’s
because in many cases you can hire someone that’s productive, but just not as productive as
your “ideal” employee. Since the cost of replacing a new employee can be as much as 3 times
the employee’s salary, you’ll never replace the less productive employee because, in general,
they’re productive “enough.” But you could have had an ideal employee in their place had you
made better hiring decisions.

Hiring the wrong employee is costly, whether you hired a good but not great employee or you flat
out hired a bad employee. Businesses live and die by their ROI, and every time you miss out on
that next great contributor you’re putting your company are greater risk of future problems.

The Minimum You Should Do

Hiring on a gut feeling, or because of just a good interview, is simply not the best way to ensure
you’re hiring a great employee. At minimum, you should consider the following:

 Background Checks – These are a given. Find out about their criminal history, their
background, and any information that may make employment with your company a
bad idea. A candidate’s personal history may not always play a role in the workplace,
but it can, and it’s something you at the very least need to know and consider.
 Reference Checks – These have fallen out of favour in recent years, but they
shouldn’t have, because a well done reference check can play a very important role
in determining who is the right employee for your company and who is not.
Companies such as EMPLOYMENT OFFICE can also handle reference checks for
you, in case you simply feel too awkward doing them or are worried about legal
repercussions.
 Google Search – Of course, a simple Google search should be a part of every
candidate evaluation. There are some ethical issues about looking too deeply into
someone’s past and character (remember, Googling their name could bring up photos
that create biases) but sometimes the first few results in a Google search of a unique
name can tell you a lot about the applicant.

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These are the bare minimum ways to analyse an applicant’s true eligibility, and should be a
standard part of every recruitment practice no matter how big your company or how important the
role.

The Additional Options

Of course, “bare minimum” implies that there are other options as well, and sure enough there
are a lot of tools that you can use to evaluate whether or not a candidate is truly worth your time.
Some include:

 Skills Testing – You may not be able to put an employee to work for free to see how
they do, but there are skills tests that can analyse the talents of the candidate and
what they bring to the table.
 Behavioural Testing – Like skills testing, there is also behavioural testing. This is
where you can learn more about an applicant – who they are, what they act like, how
they handle certain situations and more.
 Leadership Testing – For those that are applying for leadership positions, there are
also leadership tests. These are great tools for finding out if someone is a true leader,
and knows how to handle being in charge.

These are all tests that are available to those that request them – all of which allow the employer
to learn a great deal about the applicant and whether or not they’re the “right hire” that they have
been looking for.

Making Smart Decisions

Bad hires are costly to the company, and while you can still find productive employees even from
inadequate shortlisting, there is a difference between a good applicant and the “perfect applicant.”
Make sure that you’re giving every applicant a thorough check to ensure you’re not making the
wrong decision.

Step 6: The Interview Process

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You’ve done it. You’ve created your shortlist. You’ve managed to go through your entire list,
narrowed it down to few applicants, and now you’re ready to start the interview process.

Interviewing provides your first opportunity to meet the applicant as an individual – where you get
to ask them personalized questions and decide if you want to hire them.

There are two ways to interview:

 On the Fly – Where the interviewer comes up with questions to ask on the go
depending on where the conversation takes them.
 Planned/Scheduled – Where the interviewer has an action plan, and knows exactly
what they’re asking.

Holding interviews without much planning has its merits, because interviewers have the
opportunity to ask questions they may not have originally planned. But it also has many downfalls.
First, you may not be able to ask any questions of value. Second, you may not be able to brand
your company well because you have a sloppy interview.

But perhaps most importantly, interviews that aren’t well planned also make it harder to evaluate
across talent. For example, let’s say you end up interviewing a candidate that is incredibly
personable. They are telling you stories about their experiences, they are getting into
conversations about workplace culture, etc. They don’t tell you much about their history, but they
tell you a lot about themselves.

Then you have another candidate that is a bit less personable. Questions are focused on abilities,
and the candidate’s abilities are strong. Who do you hire – the one that was never asked about
abilities or the one that was given more of an opportunity? How do you compare across
candidates when the interviews are not the same?

This is why you need to plan the entire interview process – not only the questions, but how you
interview, how you plan to identify great candidates, and so on. There are many different ways to
interview, and there are many different questions to ask. You have to make sure that you’ve
mapped out each portion so that the strongest candidates are identified and hired.

Phone Interviews

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It starts with a phone interview. This is a common way to shortlist candidates. All “good enough”
candidates are called in bulk. They are asked a series of questions, almost always set-questions.
In some ways, these should actually be your most important questions – the ones that make or
break whether or not a candidate can be hired by your business.

Using your candidate profile, set up your “must haves” – the candidate history that you simply
cannot be without, and the ones that you have to have if you’re going to make a hire. Then run
through them with each candidate.

It’s always a good idea to avoid as many questions that could create biases as possible –
removing questions that have too subjective answers. That is because when you do phone
interviews, you’re often rolling through candidates at a rapid pace. You want to make sure that
you’re not accidentally missing a great candidate simply because you just got off the phone with
another great candidate and their answers weren’t quite as good, nor do you want the tedium of
phone interviews to affect how you view an applicant’s answer. Some personality and subjective
questions are fine, but most important is using it to rapidly shortlist candidates by finding out their
answers to your company’s most crucial questions.

BONUS INFORMATION: Video Interviews

Video Interviews

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While not relevant to every company, you can also consider holding video interviews using
programs like Skype. These are sort of a combination of phone interviews and face to face
interviews. They’re a bit less personable than phone interviews and prone to similar
misunderstandings (video interview software can be buggy), but you’re given the opportunity to
talk to the employee directly, see their face when they answer, and ask similar questions.

Video interviews are ideal for individuals that live a distance away and are unable to come for an
in-person interview. They are also useful for highly-technical companies that want to conduct
phone interviews in a more personal way. They are not always easy to implement, but for
companies that know they are going to have a lot of out-of-area applicants, you may want to
consider putting them in your interview plan and figuring out how you’re going to analyse them.

The Face to Face Interview

Even though you asked some of the most crucial questions at the phone interview, the in-person
interview is always going to be the most important. Traditional in person interviews are your
opportunity to get to know the candidate directly. You get to ask more questions, talk more about
their experiences, introduce them to the office and see how well they feel like a fit.

If you’ve ever recruited before, you have likely handled face to face interviews before, and entire
books are written about the art of interviewing. Nevertheless, when it comes to your interview
plan, the following are important tips for evaluating applicants:

§ Have “Must Ask” Questions – Like the phone interviews, there are certain questions that
you should make sure you ask every candidate, to compare them against each other. You
can adjust a question given a different experience (ie, when you worked for Facebook, what
was your experience with…” for one candidate and “When you worked for Google, what was
your experience with…” for another), but you should at least have equivalent questions to
ensure you’re correctly comparing candidates.

§ Plan With Other Interviewers – At most in-person interviews, the applicant meets with
multiple interviewers. Make sure you plan with all of them, so you’re not asking the same
questions over and over, or wasting time with analysis. Every interviewer should know their
role in the interview process, what they’re going to ask, and what they’re evaluating.

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 § Brand the Company – Interviews are also where you want to become more attractive to
the applicant, so you’ll also want to brand yourself as well. Let them know what work is like,
what they get, and why they’d want to work for you. See their interest and make sure they
genuinely want to work there. This is also important after the interview is over, in case you
attract a talent with more than one offer.

§ Create Challenge Questions – Questions shouldn’t only be focused on past experiences.

Make sure you have questions in there that tell you something about the person’s character
and problem solving ability. Some prefer “wildcard questions” which are questions that have
no real answer, like “why are manhole covers round?” But behavioural interview questions
and problem solving interview questions (“imagine you have an angry customer, what would
you do if….?”) are all valuable.

§ Use Your Candidate Profile – Finally, don’t forget your candidate profile. You’re looking
for someone that matches that profile perfectly, and you need to make sure you’re asking
questions and making decisions that will increase the likelihood of finding that person. Of
course, there may be candidates that are perfect that don’t match your initial profile, and
that’s okay too, but at least the interview should be focused on the ideas that you set forward
for yourself.

These are the keys to a successful face to face interview. There are a lot of questions and ways
to conduct an interview, and they would take millions of words to share here, but if you follow the
above tips your face to face will be successful.

Selecting the Right Candidate

Once you have your information, how do you select a candidate? You try to find the one that
matched the candidate profile, showed the behaviours and personalities that you were looking
for, and had a history that makes you confident in their abilities.

It’s recommended that you do anything you can to evaluate applicants objectively. One strategy
that is very effective is having interviewers and everyone involved in the process share their
thoughts via survey, rather than in person. In person, people are prone to the biases of others.
But in a survey, you’ll be able to read who people prefer as their ideal candidate, why, the
qualifications they have, and so on, and this will give you a more objective analysis tool from
which to hire.

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One of the reasons we offer shortlisting services at Employment Office is so that you’re already
selecting from a pool of upper tier candidates. If you do everything right, you should be able to
find an applicant that performs above to well-above expectations.

Step 7: Candidate Care

At this point you’ve probably decided who to hire, and you’re ready to make them an offer, start
talking salary, and figure out the next steps. But you have an interim step before then – responding
to those that did not get the job.

Candidate Care

Remember, part of quality recruitment is about branding and marketing your

business. Recruitment marketing ensures that the best candidates want to apply for your
company, and that you’re a company that cares about its employees.

This is where candidate care comes in. All candidates are important, even the ones you don’t
want to hire. Someday they may be the perfect fit for a different job that opens up in your company.
Or they may see an open job someday for a position that their friend is qualified for, and you want
them to willingly and happily forward it to their friend. Or they may leave your company a review
on websites like GlassDoor.com, and you want it to be as positive as possible.

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No matter what, you want every single applicant for your company to feel as though you care
about their candidacy, because someday it can pay off with your recruitment advertising efforts.

How to Make Sure Applicants Feel You Care

 Reply to All Unsuccessful Candidates

As stated above, every candidate should feel special, and you should make sure that you go out
of your way to reply to every unsuccessful candidate – even those you never contacted for a
phone interview. At the very least, they should receive a thoughtful and well written email (it can
be a stock email if you get too many applicants, but it should still be a kind one) and make them
feel like you genuinely reviewed their information.

Make sure you’re specific to the level they reached. Be more personal to those that had phone
interviews, and even more personal to those that had an in-person interview. Rejection is hard for
everyone, and the further they went in the interview process the more sensitive they’ll be to your
rejection. Treat every applicant as though they’re special.

 Call or Provide Number to Call

If possible – especially for candidates that went through the interview process – call them and let
them know of the rejection. This personal strategy can keep relationships strong and make them
want to apply again in the future.

But for all applicants – at least those that reached the phone interview stage – you should try to
at least provide a number to call in case they want to find out why they did not get the job. Many
candidates will have questions. Those that know you’re willing to offer explanations will feel less
offended and may even learn from the experience and apply again in the future when they are
more skilled.

 Sign Then Up for Your Database

Offer to sign candidates up for your candidate database – a database where you keep and
maintain the CVs/resumes of all of the candidates that have applied for your company.

If you do not have a CV database you should strongly consider starting one. Great companies
develop talent pipelines so that as soon as any job opens in the company, they already have

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people that they can invite and call. CV databases allow you to quickly and easily find potential
candidates that are in need of a new career, and reduce resume spam by keeping candidate
information on hand and considering it for all careers.

Most candidates will love to hear that their CV will stay in your company, because it means that
you’re interested, and letting them know that they can sign up for your CV database will both:

1. Give them the power to choose whether they want to be a part of your company, and

2. Give you more data and information for all future openings.

Starting a CV database benefits your company as well as the candidate, and is easy to start via
programs like Excel, Google Docs, MailChimp, etc. You can also contactEmployment Office and
we can talk to you about starting a CV database with our talented staff.

The Importance of Candidate Care

Every candidate matters, because each one could be a future contributor or affect your ability to
hire other applicants in the future. Your business should brand itself as one that cares, and no
matter whether you decide to hire a person in your company or not, you should always prove you
care using the tips above.

Step 8: Hiring the Candidate/On Boarding

Congratulations! You have managed to find an excellent candidate – one that matches your
candidate profile perfectly. Hopefully you’ve managed to come up with a fair and/or generous
salary and benefits package, and the employee is happy to be on board.

It would seem that recruitment is complete, but there is actually another step, and this step is
arguably more important than even hiring the right candidate – helping the candidate adapt to
their new environment and preparing them for the role.

What So Many Companies Do Wrong

There are a lot of companies that have learned how to hire well. But there are a lot more
companies that have not learned how to help those new employees adapt to the work
environment. You can find a candidate that matches every single quality you want in the

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employee, but if you don’t properly help them adapt to the work environment, you may not get
what you expect from the candidate.

Known as on-boarding, you should have a process that helps new hires assimilate to your
company easily.

What Happens if You Don’t Train

When you hire a new employee, the hope is that the employee is talented enough that they can
sit down on their chair and get started right away. But unfortunately it doesn’t quite work that way.
Every company is different. You have different processes, different needs, different technology,
and different expectations.

Even within identical technology (for example, Sales Force software), different companies use the
products differently, so someone that has worked with the program before may still not know how
to “use it” the way you expect.

Similarly, your company is not exactly the same as every other company. Even if the employee
knows their job perfectly, they may not know who to contact in the event something goes wrong,
or where the sticky notes are, or where you all meet up for meetings.

The better you train a new employee, and the more you prepare them for the job ahead, the more
successful they will be. Studies have shown that it can take as long as 24 months for an employee
to be “fully productive.” That means that even if you found the best employee, it may still take 2
years before the employee starts to be as productive as possible. One of the primary reasons for
this long delay is poor training – throwing someone in the role before making sure they’re ready.

If you don’t fully train your employees, it can badly effect your new hire, and thus your recruitment.
Poorly trained employees:

 Have Worse Productivity – The most obvious problem is simply productivity. An

employee that hasn’t learned your company yet is going to be one that struggles in
the beginning, because they simply don’t know what to do next or how to contribute.
That’s on your company, not on the employee, and so in order to get the most from
your employee you need to make sure they know exactly what to do. Imagine finding

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 the “best employee” and causing them to be less than the best employee because
you didn’t onboard them correctly.
 Have Worse Satisfaction – Even more problematic is satisfaction. A true talent
knows they can contribute, but they’ll become stressed and frustrated when they don’t
know what to do. They may see it as a flaw in your company, and they may regret
some of their choices to take on the position. Even great pay won’t make up for stress
as a result of being unsure what to do on a daily basis, or feeling like you left them
out to dry.
 Have Worse Loyalty – Finally – and this is what relates to recruitment – an employee
that starts out stressed at your company is going to have less loyalty to your company
than one that starts out feeling confident and fully trained. Not only can a newly hired
employee still take a new job if it’s offered (don’t forget that many new hires still have
resumes out to other employers), but the strongest bonds between you and the new
employee are made by first impressions. Start off poorly, and you’re going to have to
make sure you’re an excellent place to work if you want the talent to stay.

They’ll also take away from the productivity of others, because they’ll need to ask people for help
constantly and interrupt other employees that are also doing their best to be productive.

As soon as an employee doesn’t start off to their strengths, it can create a domino effect for their
entire experience. An outstanding employee gets hired but isn’t well trained. Their co-workers and
supervisors do not see them as a great employee, and do not treat them with the care and respect
they deserve as a true talent. The employee becomes unhappy, doesn’t work as hard, the cycle
continues, and they eventually leave – all because they didn’t get the proper training.

This story has been told a million times. It’s up to you and your company to make sure the
transition to productive employee is seamless.

How to Help Your New Employee Thrive

So now you know what not to do. But what about what your company SHOULD do?

It all starts with training. Train as if the employee has almost no experience in the position.
Thorough training doesn’t take as long as it sounds. Sit them down with a skilled employee, and
talk to them about what’s done, how to do it, etc. Even though you hired them because they know

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the role already, the reality is that they can still use that confidence that comes from starting a
new career. Showing a willingness to assist them thoroughly can help give them that confidence.

There are also many other ways to improve your relationship with the new hire from the get go.
Some of these include:

 Forging Personal Relationships With Co-workers

A great way to get someone acclimated to the new environment is to give them an opportunity to
bond with the people around them. Give them opportunities to talk to their new co-workers. Let
them build relationships, and show who they are.

You can do this through events, or through better introductions (for example, time with each co-
worker instead of simply saying their name and moving on), reminders of names if they appear
confused, and projects they can work on together.

The better the introductions, the better the employee will adapt to the new environment.

 Give Them “Day in the Life” Experiences

Earlier we mentioned the fact that even the perfect employee – one that knows exactly how to do
their job from the moment they start at work – will still not know the day to day basics of working
for your office. They probably won’t know where the copy room is, or who they’re supposed to
report to if they have a problem with work, or who they call if they’re sick, etc.

They will also be curious about the dress code. They’ll want to know about work events, and
whether or not people are allowed to leave early/come in late if their work is done.

So giving them the opportunity to thoroughly get to know the processes inside of your company
and doing your best to introduce everything that the candidate will need to know about how your
business works will ensure that the little minute that make up working in a new company will not
hinder their development.

 Their Growth Potential – And How

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You may also want to start motivating them for the future already. Teach them how they can grow,
what they can do to earn more salary, how often raises/merit raises are handed out, what their
future position may be, and if there is anything special they can do to get there.

Explain all of the growth options you have available (like additional schooling) or if there is a place
they can go to be groomed for a better position. These expectations and this knowledge can keep
them motivated towards working harder and understanding of what’s out there for them, and while
not all positions have this type of growth potential, those that do should consider it a major part of
onboarding.

 New Employee Checklist

Another strategy you should strongly consider – and one that is part of a new employee plan – is
the creation of a new employee checklist. With the new employee, you go through everything that
they may need to start their job. For example, their computer, their phone, when/how to answer
the phone, login information, directories and computer information (knowing where important
documents are in the folders), and more.

Going through a checklist of all of the things the employee will need in order to get started will
ensure there are fewer delays and frustrations. Ideally, the items on the checklist should be ready
before the employee has even been hired so that you can showcase your organizational skills.

Researching and Following Up on the Candidate

No matter how much you plan and how hard you try, you’re going to have a very hard time
accounting for everything and making every single employee feel welcome and prepared. But
that’s okay. You can try to learn from your mistakes and grow, and ultimately perfect your
onboarding process.

It’s with that in mind that you should also strongly consider a new hire survey – a survey that goes
out to all of the new hires in your company and collects information on the onboarding process
anonymously, giving you more data from which to change/alter your onboarding procedures.

These surveys need to be:

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  100% Anonymous. Consider having them sent to a 3rd party, and only reviewing the
results of the survey once every few months so that they can’t get back to the
employee.
 Incentivized – This should be an important part of the new hire’s job, since it will help
you with all future new hires. Make sure they have dedicated time for it and that they
are rewarded in some way for taking it so that they understand how important it is to
you.
 Timely – New hire surveys should be given at the right time(s). They should be
provided after the employee has completed their training to get fresh information, but
not before the employee is given a day or two to adapt. You can also consider giving
the survey on more than one occasion, to see how the training has paid off in the
short and long term.

The on boarding process is too important to trust that it is working effectively, so these new hire
surveys give you a chance to evaluate how effective they are from the new employee’s
perspective, and possibly figure out what changes you can start making in order to improve upon
the survey in the future.

The Importance of Onboarding

All of this information should make it clear – onboarding is not only important, but it is still a part
of recruitment. You can hire all of the best candidates the employment pool has to offer, but if
you’re not getting them ready for the job and teaching them what they need to do to succeed,
you’re putting them in a position to fail, or to not provide the output that they are capable of
providing.

With the improved likelihood of turnover for employees that do not feel comfortable and the loss
of production for your other employees, there are simply too many reasons to make sure that
onboarding is your company’s priority, and a significant part of the recruitment process.

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Concluding Thoughts

Recruitment is one of the areas that your company can succeed. But in order to be successful,
you need to treat it like more than a simple “send in your resume, I’ll take a look process.” You
need to make recruitment a priority:

 Using some of the available tools.

 Creating action plans.
 Figuring out your true “ideal” new hire.

From the creation of your candidate profile to the way you treat that employee after they’ve been
hired, you need to make sure that you’re giving your recruitment all of the attention it deserves.

Learning Activity 1

Read the following uploaded notes/ articles:

1. Best Practices for Recruitment and Selection

2. The Use of Social Media for Recruitment
3. Blueprint For Modern Talent Acquisition

Learning Activity 2

Go through the following PowerPoint:

1. Recruitment and Selection

Learning Activity 3

Visit and browse the following websites:

1. www.nfpjobs.com.au

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 2. www.bluecollar.com.au
3. www.traveljobs.biz
4. www.jobsite.co.uk
5. www.monster.co.uk

Learning Activity 4

View the following videos at:

1. Digital E-Recruitment Process at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v780wqrbNGM

2. Online Recruitment, e-Recruitment at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIVLZTNaZxY

3. e Recruitment Strategy Online Recruitment Techniques for Hiring Winners

at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0tfwH_11HU
4. The adoption of e-recruitment practices for attracting a wider pool of talent
at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxBcJVlh5ZE

Session 3

Tapping into Employee Network And Into Recruiters

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Learning Outcomes

On completion of this session you will be able to:

1. Appreciate the increasingly acceptance of using employee social network as a

recruiting tool.
2. Examine the relative advantages and disadvantages of referral programmes.
3. Examine key processes and steps required to create and manage a good system of
employee referral programme.

1. Introduction

If your business is like most others, your next hire already works for you, or knows someone who
does. Yet most organizations don’t have the tools necessary to effectively identify or recruit
talented internal candidates or manage referrals. With businesses facing the challenge of hiring
the best people in an increasingly complex job market, the ability to successfully engage internal
candidates and referrals is critical to reducing overall hiring costs and improving organizational
performance and success. It is for this reason that more companies are turning to unified recruiting
solutions that go beyond merely tracking and evaluating candidates to creating ready talent pools,
building custom career sites, and leveraging employee referrals.

2,0 Leveraging Existing Employees

Despite high unemployment rates, a 2014 Recruiting Trends survey shows that finding top
quality job candidates is the primary challenge of nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of
recruiters. Other top recruiting challenges include filling roles with specific job skills (cited by 45
percent of respondents to the survey), filling job requisitions in a timely manner (34 percent of
respondents) and minimizing time spent sifting through resumes (26 percent of respondents).
Some 17 percent of recruiters say their organization is located in an area with low volumes of

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candidates.

What are your biggest recruiting challenges?

While U.S. businesses spend $110 billion on employee acquisition (reports Bersin by Deloitte),
nearly half of all positions are filled by internal candidates, employee referrals or social
networking. Fifty four percent of recruiters cite employee referrals as one of their top sources of
candidates, finds a 2014 survey conducted by Recruiting Trends and sponsored by Cornerstone
OnDemand, Inc.

What’s more, 73.6 percent of recruiters surveyed by Recruiting Trends say that employee
referrals generate the best quality candidates. Employee referrals was followed by the

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organization’s career web site (cited by 52 percent of recruiters), online jobs boards (cited by 48
percent), and LinkedIn (cited by 44 percent) as other sources of high quality job candidates.

More than one-third of respondents surveyed by Recruiting Trends (35 percent) put existing
employees (or internal hires) among their top three sources of the highest quality job candidates.

Not only do internal referrals tend to attract better people, they also help create brand evangelists
within the company, further strengthening the company’s ties to current employees and its culture.

Employee referrals also lead to more diversity, faster application-to-hire times and greater
happiness.

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Despite the importance of internal employee management, most businesses rely on recruiting or
applicant tracking systems that were built for the way organizations recruited 10 years ago. These
antiquated systems are far better suited to supporting applicant tracking and related compliance
requirements

than to assisting a recruiter or hiring manager in identifying and learning about internal candidates
or sharing referrals. These systems also are extremely hard for candidates and human resources
teams to use, are focused on external (rather than internal) candidates, and are largely isolated
from the new hire onboarding process. What’s more, the systems tend to be disconnected from
valuable data -- such as internal employee performance data, role competencies, and skills --
stored elsewhere.

3.0 The Need for Unified Recruiting Solutions

Recruiters recognize the need for a unified recruiting strategy. Recruiting Trends research shows
that 17 percent of recruiters are challenged with leveraging more employee referrals, while 14
percent of recruiters cite difficulty in recruiting internal employees for new roles. Not surprisingly,
only 23 percent of recruiters say internal hires are among their top sources of candidates.

Traditional recruiting approaches are largely to blame for the poor results that organizations are
having in leveraging employee referrals and identifying internal candidates. Recruiting Trends
research shows that recruiters from a majority of organizations (52 percent) rely on an internal
career site to identify internal candidates. Some 16 percent of organizations identify internal
candidates by “asking around,” while 5 percent of organizations speak with HR to identify internal
candidates. Only 4 percent of organizations use a technology solution to identify internal
candidates.

About one-fifth of organizations (20.8 percent) do not have a way to identify internal candidates.

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A closer examination of the findings of the Recruiting Trends survey illustrates the need for unified
recruiting tools. Only 12 percent of organizations that responded to the survey have deployed a
technology solution that employees can browse to learn about potential job opportunities. Current
employees at most organizations (58 percent) hear about job opportunities within the organization
through an internal career web site. Tellingly, 11 percent of organizations told Recruiting Trends
that their current employees find out about other potential job opportunities by “asking around,”
while 10 percent of organizations say their current employees must speak with HR to learn about
other potential job opportunities within the company. Eight percent of organizations say there is
no way for their employees to learn about job opportunities.

Organizations also have been slow in adopting social recruiting tools. Today’s job candidates
research companies and job openings through social and professional online networks more so
than through a company’s Web site, according to Career Builder’s 2012 “Candidate Behavior
Study: The Myth of the Passive Job Seeker.” The job seeker currency is changing from historic
resumes to dynamic profiles maintained in channels like LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+. But

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the Recruiting Trends research shows that 45 percent of organizations rely on a basic applicant
tracking system with no social capabilities to support their recruiting efforts. Some 5 percent of
organizations surveyed by Recruiting Trends support their recruiting efforts using a platform with
mostly social capabilities and no applicant tracking. Worse, 11 percent of organizations use
spreadsheets and paper to support their recruiting efforts, while 4 percent of survey respondents
have no systems to support their recruiting efforts and 3 percent didn’t know which systems their
organization was using. Only 29 percent of organizations have a total recruiting platform that
incorporates applicant tracking and social capabilities, according to the Recruiting Trends survey.

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The limited use of unified recruiting solutions is reflected in the answers respondents gave when
asked about the most important thing their organization can do to improve their recruiting efforts.
Here is a sample of the measures respondents would like to see their organization take:

 Emphasis of an internal referral program

 Better use of employee referrals

 Implementation of a better applicant tracking and social recruiting system

 Investments in recruiting tools

 Use of an integrated social media campaign

 Tracking-to-hire

 More effective database utilization

 Routine texts regarding job opportunities to current employees

 Use of a mobile-enabled application system

 Ensure that all recruiters have LinkedIn recruiter accounts

 Use of focused mapping for internal and external candidates

 Recruiting dashboards

 Increased recruiting budget

 Relocation to more heavily populated area

4.0 Case Study: New Belgium Brewing

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New Belgium Brewing, a nationally renowned craft brewery that produces high quality, Belgian-
inspired beers, is benefiting from the deployment of a unified recruiting solution.

In just over two decades, New Belgium has grown to become the third-largest craft brewery in the
United States, employing approximately 500 people. To support its growth, including the recent
construction of a second brewery in Asheville, North Carolina, and the expansion of its sales
force, New Belgium’s hiring teams needed to increase their sourcing efforts while reducing time
to hire.

After an evaluation of available solutions, New Belgium deployed a unified recruiting system. The
solution stood apart based on its flexibility to adapt to the company’s existing hiring processes
and its ability to expand with the company as business and workforce needs increase.

Deploying a unified recruiting tool provided the brewery with a range of benefits:

 Faster identification of candidates: New Belgium was challenged with how to efficiently
review the 200 to 300 applications it receives for each of its job openings to quickly identify
candidates with the necessary skills, and who self-select into the company’s culture. With
a unified recruiting solution, the brewery can find the right people for the right jobs, in less
time, providing hiring teams with more time to engage with candidates.

 More collaboration among hiring teams: New Belgium’s recruiting platform enables
geographically dispersed members of its hiring teams to review the same applicant data
to more easily collaborate on applicant assessments and hiring decisions.

 Enhanced workforce planning: New Belgium’s current and future expansions will
require a steady stream of job candidates to help grow the brewery’s brand across the
country. A unified recruiting solution supports New Belgium’s hiring needs by enabling the
brewery to source, engage with, and recruit candidates, no matter where they are located.

Unified recruiting provides New Belgium with a one-stop-show to source and recruit great
candidates, independent of location, as the brewery continues to grow.

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5.0 The Solution

Unifie recruiting systems address the modern challenges recruiters face in identifying and
engaging internal candidates and referrals. These tools provide several key capabilities:

 Social recruiting: identify candidates from internal and external networks, discover how
applicants are connected to existing employees, and make it easy to exchange feedback
and comments among the candidate review team. Businesses are tapping into their
employee networks to uncover potential candidates via social network integration,
employee referral engines, internal and external candidate searches, and integration with
resume databases. Recruiters also are using unified solutions to create and post job ads
across job boards, social networks and employee communities from a single interface.

 Recruitment management: empower managers, employees and recruiters to evaluate

and track potential candidates using applicant management, configurable workflow and
requisition management, and custom interactive career sites that showcase your employer
brand.

 Employee communities: enable organizations and individual managers to more easily

build bench strength and nurture internal and external candidate pools and foster ongoing
candidate relationships. Businesses can engage candidate pools with targeted
communications that increase awareness of their employer brand and provide internal
candidates the training they need to advance their careers.

 Interview management: schedule, manage and track every element of the candidate
interview process, and provide necessary prep materials, through integrations with
organizational calendars.

 Embedded video interviewing: connect with candidates sooner, no matter where they
are, and provide more immediate feedback to hiring managers.

 Mobile recruiting: review resumes, collaborate on applicants, check the status of

candidate pipelines and review organizational requisition dashboards from any
smartphone or tablet.

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  Background check integration: populate candidate information in background check
forms to accelerate the turnaround for new hires and more quickly identify potential issues.
 Workforce planning: identify talent gaps and plan for future workforce needs. Today’s
market for employees is a fluid one with workers being asked to update their skills more
often than ever. And recruiting is no longer a static or periodic event – 74 percent of
workers are either actively searching for a new job or open to new opportunities, according
to Career Builder’s 2012 study, “Candidate Behavior Study: The Myth of the Passive Job
Seeker.”

This approach delivers major business and operational benefits for recruiters and hiring
managers:

 Build bench strength: unified recruiting solutions enable businesses to gain visibility into
existing employee pools, proactively train and develop employees for key positions, and
nurture external candidate pools to foster ongoing relationships.

 Expand your candidate pipeline: recruiting systems empower recruiters, employees

and candidates to share jobs across hundreds of social networks. Businesses can create
and post requisitions on popular job boards and social employee communications,
expanding their reach and raising the effectiveness of their talent pipeline building.
Tapping into employee networks can also result in rapid referrals and fast hires for
immediate needs.

 Attract higher quality candidates: as the 2014 Recruiting Trends survey illustrates,
employee referrals generate the highest quality job candidates. Higher quality hires also
mean that new employees can make a larger impact, sooner. And employees are more
likely to mentor and assist people they have referred, resulting in faster time to productivity.

 Improve employee retention: unified recruiting tools help enable candidates to self-
select into a company’s culture, so hiring managers waste less time on candidates who
are the wrong “fit.” Making greater use of referrals also improves retention as employees
understand their employer’s culture and screen out those who are a weak fit. What’s more,
proactively training and developing employees to fill open positions will increase
engagement among existing employees, in turn, improving retention.

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Facilitate collaborative hiring: recruiting solutions promote internal team reviews,
discussions and ratings of candidates, regardless of where team members are located.

These benefits are much harder to achieve with antiquated recruiting and applicant tracking
systems.

6.0 Measures to Tap Employee Network

a. Appoint a team member to mine employee networks. This person should actively
review employee networks and engage the employee(s) in identifying strong potential
candidates for your organisation.
b. Build a pipeline of potential candidates for future recruitment needs. The following
steps can help you create a pipeline of potential candidates that you can reach quickly
and warmly when the need arises:
c. Chat with your employees individually and openly discuss members of their networks that
might be a good fit in the company
d. Check your employees’ LinkedIn profiles for professional contacts (and remember that
Facebook typically represents a network of very close connections—often with former
coworkers)
e. Create an active campaign to promote the company to individuals you’ve targeted to be
good potential additions to the team. Engage your employees in this activity
f. Pay special attention to your top talent: chances are good that they are connected to more
top talent
g. Give generous referral bonuses
h. Repeat, repeat, repeat

Leveraging your employee network: Tips to help the process succeed

TIP 1: GET A STRAIGHTFORWARD ASSESSMENT

Ask the referring employee to consider these two questions:

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  Would you be proud to have this person as a co-worker?
 Would you be excited to have them work here?

TIP 2: CONDUCT QUALITY CONTROL

Have a member of your executive team check the candidates. If you have a recruiter doing the
hands-on work, do spot checks to ensure the system is working.

TIP 3: INVOLVE THE REFERRING EMPLOYEES IN THE PROCESS

 Involve them by asking for a warm introduction

 Have your employees greet the candidate(s) that they refer and give them a tour
 Give them feedback on the process
 Recognize them for their efforts

TIP 4: DURING THE INTERVIEW, INCLUDE BOTH KNOWLEDGE-BASED AND

BEHAVIOURAL-BASED QUESTIONS

 Find out whether the candidate:

 Has the intelligence and aptitude or “hard skills”
 Can handle stressful deadlines and “think on their feet”
 Can work through unpleasant situations to get things done
 Identify and ask about the candidate’s fit with other key competencies needed to succeed
at your organisation.

TIP 5: MAKE MINING EMPLOYEE NETWORKS A CONTINUOUS PROCESS EVEN WHEN

NOT ACTIVELY HIRING

 Hold informal brainstorming sessions (especially with your top talent) to create lists of
potential hires
 Track information gained for future use

Conclusion

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Despite high unemployment rates, Manpower Group’s 2013 Talent Shortage Survey reports that
20 percent of employers are faced with employee shortages that are affecting their ability to meet
client needs. Nearly half of business leaders are experiencing difficulty filling key positions, Bersin
by Deloitte reports. The challenge will become even greater as businesses shift their attention
from cost-cutting and retrenchment to globalization, innovation and growth. The root of the
problem is that traditional recruiting technology and applicant tracking systems are not effective
in managing internal candidates and referrals. It is for this reason that more businesses are
deploying unified recruiting solutions that go beyond merely tracking and evaluating candidates
to creating ready candidate pools, building custom

career sites, and leveraging employee referrals. By tapping into their existing employee base with
a unified recruiting solution, businesses can discover and hire top people in ways that support
their goals to build stronger internal mobility, fill roles faster, increase the quality of external
referrals, and provide a well-supported transition from candidate to employee.

Learning Activity 1

Read the following uploaded notes/ articles:

1. Employee Referral
2. Accenture Referral Programme

Learning Activity 2

Go through the following PowerPoints:

1. Tapping Employee Network

2. Employee Referral Programme
3. Employee Referral 1

Learning Activity 3

View the following videos at:

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1. Introducing LinkedIn Referrals: Empower your employees to recruit at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_WCdvrqI-4

2. Introducing LinkedIn Referrals for Employees

at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wBtRnX-5N4

3. Recruiting & Hiring Best Practices: Internal Mobility (Employee Portal | Employee
Referrals) at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ovg3QeqHu0

4. Social Referrals = Social Networks + Employee Referrals at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghdxwvAv7E

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 Session 4

Web Based e Recruitment Practices

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this session, you will be able to:

1. Identify various tools and practices associated with Web Based e Recruitment
2. Examine in detail, 3 main tools used including Job Posting portal, Digital Resume Bank/
Database and Career Website.

1.0 Introduction

Online recruitment uses the power of the internet to match people to jobs. Fundamentally, it is
about advertising vacancies on either job sites or corporate websites. At this very basic level it is
particularly effective at getting a high level of response. While it may generate hundreds more
applications than traditional print advertising, simply attracting more candidates is only part of the
job. The current view is that truly effective online recruitment could be as low as 10% of the top
blue-chip corporate companies.

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The real strength and power of online recruitment, when done properly, lie in harnessing internet
technology to not just attract candidates but to deal with them too. In this sense it is also about
streamlining the recruitment process -so busy HR departments can give a better recruitment
service to their colleagues in finance, marketing, sales and manufacturing. Plus it frees up more
of their time for more value-added tasks.

A specialist software provider, such as HR Portal, can develop bespoke application programmes
for recruiters that will save time, effort and money. They can automate the pre-selection process
by setting 'killer questions' (that only the top candidates will answer correctly), profiling and
scoring, psychometric tests and automatic CV scans to look for key words such as qualifications
and experience.

What are the benefits of online recruitment over traditional recruitment?

There are many benefits to be had by recruiting online: here are a few.

1) Wide geographical reach

Advertising online opens up a much wider candidate pool than advertising in print. This gives you
a much better chance of finding the right candidate for the job. Note, however, this is only a benefit
if sifting, sorting and grading tools are applied to the applications coming in. Otherwise you'll have
hundreds to go through manually which becomes a liability. As we said, the advertising is only
part of the effective online recruitment.

2) Speed

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Jobs posted online go live in literally minutes and candidates can - and do - respond immediately.
HR Portal has a great statistic from one of its clients HFC Bank: from the vacancy appearing
online to the candidate appearing in the interview room took just three hours. While this was an
exception, it proves it can be done.

For companies needing to recruit staff quickly to handle extra work, cover sickness, leave or other
staff shortages, the option to advertise, select and appoint people within (typically) 48 hours is a
huge bonus.

3) Lower Cost

This may surprise you but technology in online recruitment is not expensive. By saving on time,
design and print costs and targeting precisely the best sites for the best candidates, online
recruitment is a very cost-effective option.

Not only that, but the hours saved through automating the pre-selection process represent a
considerable cost cut in terms of HR time needed to get candidates to the interview stage.
Suddenly, HR staff have time to do more productive things.

4) Automating the Process

The pre-selection process can be tailored to individual companies' needs. This way, you can sift
and sort candidates who meet your exact needs. Not only does this save time (and cost) it also
results in a better quality of candidate reaching the interview stage having already established
they meet certain key criteria.

Automating the application process also gives a level playing field to all candidates - whether they
come directly to your company's site, via a recruitment consultant or in response to a print
advertisement. For many larger organisations, achieving consistency of handling candidates
across many branches or regional offices can be a problem: online recruitment solves it.

5) Interaction with candidates

Working online via websites and email is the way of the future. It's not just the youngsters who
are logging on to find jobs either. Recent results from NORAS shows 35% of all users are over

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35. It's quick, personal and direct. Questions are answered in seconds and information is
immediately accessible. What better way to establish whether the candidate is right for you (and
indeed that you are right for them)?

Another benefit is that candidate information can be held on file (your own searchable CV
database). So if someone is not quite right for the job for which they're applying, you can see if
their skills and profile match another job better. Working online opens up communication channels
and enables you to go directly to the candidate either immediately or at a later date when an
opportunity arises.

2.0 Components in a E Recruitment Web Based Systems

Organisation deploying a web based system for e Recruitment must have at least the following
built ins:

1. Job Posting Portal

2. Digital Resume Bank
3. Career Centre/ Website

Job Posting and Job Portal/ Site

A job posting is an advertisement created by an employer, his administrative or human resources

staff, or a recruiter that alerts current employees or the public of an immediate or future job
opening within a company. The posting might appear on a company’s bulletin board, website or
blog; or in print media, such as newspapers, magazines and industry-related publications. Job
postings might also appear on career, job board, classified ad and social networking sites.
Additionally, some employers invest in posting job openings via electronic ticker-style signs and
phone or browser apps.

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Format

The format and size of a job notice depends on a number of factors including the job type, space
available, cost to post and employer preferences. For example, a posting on a company or career
site that offers space for full descriptions might include a job title, duties and responsibilities,
education and experience requirements, hours, wages, benefits, application instructions and
contact information. A notice posted to a social network that limits single message space, such
as Twitter, might only include a job title, location, hours and contact information, and possibly a
link to a website featuring a longer description.

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Types

The two main types of job postings are internal and external postings. An internal posting is for
employees only. As an existing employee might already possess the skills and knowledge needed
to fill a position, hiring entities often post internally to save the time and money they would lose
on external advertising, interviewing and new hire training. External postings are usually open to
the entire public or targeted to a segment, such as qualified applicants with profiles on specific
career sites. Hiring entities often post externally to locate talent that offers fresh ideas or
possesses skills not available in-house.

You can post jobs online and reap the benefit of the many potential employees searching online
for jobs. Make the online world your recruiting partner; these are the best ways to post jobs and
recruit online.

Post jobs on your company or organization website and at your company pages in social
media. Place the link prominently on your home page. Your job posting will attract candidates
who are interested in your mission and vision as well as your open jobs.

Make the recruiting portion of your website communicate your company culture, the reasons why
a prospective employee will want to choose your firm, and specific instructions about how to
successfully apply for your posted jobs.

Your company website posted jobs are also featured on online job search sites.
Indeed.com, for example, is a search engine for jobs that drives job searchers directly to
jobs on corporate career websites, employee recruiting job boards, online newspapers,
blogs, and association websites.

Opportunities for employers to post jobs online at social media sites are also growing daily. Don't
miss the opportunity to place your stake in the ground where active and passive job searchers
mingle.

Recruit through online social media sites. As the power and reach of sites such as LinkedIn,
Facebook, and Twitter expand, so does their facility as an online resource to recruit employees.
Each offers employers methods to recruit and hire employees, but the true power of their reach
may rest in your ability to tap into the power of your satisfied employees and their online networks.

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With an involved population that exceeds the number of people residing in the US, Facebook
postings about jobs and products by employees and customers reach millions in employee online
networks (friends) on Facebook.

Social media job posting opportunities are becoming one of the best ways to find
employees online. You can post jobs online at LinkedIn on your company page. Facebook
also offers company pages where you can post jobs and focus on disseminating news
about your company and your work environment. Apps available at Facebook automatically
post jobs that are drawn from your website. You can auto post to Twitter, too, using sites like
Tweet My Jobs.

If you think you can't do it, look around you; you probably can. The innovations for employer job
posting on social media sites are growing. Potential employees, who frequent these social sites,
can stay up-to-date on your job listings without ever leaving their favorite site. This is a key tool
to attract employees who have identified your company as a place where they'd like to work.

And, many additional social networking sites, based on causes, industries, interests, businesses,
skill sets, and more, exist. Identify the social media and networking sites that cater to people in
your industry, and that attract people with the skills you need, and participate. Each has its own
protocol, which you can learn, to source great candidates online.

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Post jobs on college and university boards that serve alumni. While these jobs are typically listed
through the institution's main career services channel, the college may have special services for
alumni job searchers and employer recruiters. Especially for jobs requiring degrees, you’ll locate
qualified, often local, candidates.

Almost all colleges and universities have some kind of career services office that allows you to
post jobs online. They maintain contact with their alumni and are likely to assist alumni to job
search over the course of their careers.

Additionally, they may offer employer connection services that make recruiting their alums easier
for employers. The institution from which you are recruiting, may also maintain an alumni LinkedIn
group where you can post jobs for free.

Focus your recruiting attention on colleges and universities that graduate candidates with the
degrees and skills that your company needs. It may pay you back in excellent recruits to develop
a relationship with the alumni career services staff.

Post jobs through your local college or university student career center and maintain relationships
with university departments that specialize in your needed skills. Many offer free job postings and
feature local candidates, especially for beginning career positions and internships. Others have
partnered with online services.

You can focus on colleges and universities that offer degree programs that qualify their students
for your available jobs. Or, focus on local campuses that have students who may want to remain
in your area. Colleges are dedicated to helping their students obtain employment; often a deciding
factor when students choose their college.

Use Job Search Engines to help job applicants notice your company and your online job
postings. For example, Indeed.com offers opportunities for employers to pay to have their job
listings stand out. Employers avoid the cost of posting jobs online on multiple sites that then must
be monitored.

Stay in touch with the world of job search engines. New sites proliferate and, depending on your
requirements, may help you meet your recruiting needs.

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More and more specialized job boards are entering the market. Depending on the qualifications
required from the employees you seek, specialized job boards may be a better option for your
online job posting than the big sisters in the online space.

Specialized job sites, such as Dice.com, target key employee skill sets or areas of expertise such
as technology that your company may need. You may decrease the spam of hundreds of
unqualified resumes in your inbox using more specialized job sites.

Post jobs at professional association websites. The job postings are often low cost or free,
especially for members. Your local chapters are almost all online and local candidates will view
your job posting at the local association site before they will see it at the national website. Make
spending decisions based on this recommendation.

In the same vein, post jobs in industry-related or industry-serving online or email newsletters. The
candidates you attract will generally have experience in your industry, but may be national and
look for relocation expenses paid. Depending upon the ability of your region to attract job
searchers, this may or may not be a good strategy for you.

The Digital Resume

It’s hard to pin down exactly what is meant by “digital resume,” because people in different lines
of work have come up with incredibly varied definitions, some with all kinds of bells and whistles
and some pretty standard. Generally speaking, the only real requirement for a resume to be
“digital” is that you can link to it on the web.

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That means that the information about your work history that you put on LinkedIn, for example, is
a digital resume. Likewise, so is the PDF you uploaded to your website or to a resume database.
But the term “digital resume” can also include things like graphs, videos, and links to writing,

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images, and projects you’ve done, as well as your social media profiles. Basically, the sky is the
limit as far as creativity goes, and if you are in a creative industry, it’s probably in your best interest
to go all out and really try to catch people’s attention by making it as visually interesting as
possible.

Advantages of Electronic Resumes

The switch from paper to electronic resumes can be directly related to the increased use of
scanners and computers in the workplace. In mid-to-large companies, the human resources
department may handle thousands of resumes every year. Finding the best candidate, or a
qualified job applicant, among the thousands of applications received is a tedious and error-prone
process.

By switching to an electronic format, employees working in the human resources department can
now quickly match job applicants to open positions within their organization.

Electronic Scanning

The process of collecting and storing electronic resumes in a database is fairly straightforward,
and can occur in four ways:

Email: appending it directly into the body of an email sent to the company.

Electronic Document: attaching the resume to an email in the form of a word processing
document such as Microsoft's Word or OpenOffice's Writer.

Online Forms: filled in manually on an online web form, which is subsequently imported into the
electronic database.

Postal Mail: hardcopies of the documents received by companies in the mail are subsequently
scanned into the job applicant database.

Guidelines

Technology used to accurately scan an electronic resume faces two obstacles: the organization
of information on the document, and the characters or fonts used. Scanning software also looks
for certain keywords to tell it what type of information is being conveyed, such as work experience.

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This scanning and storing of information allows for the rapid identification of resumes that match
up against certain job requirements. The formatting rules described below help this process by
providing a clean and understandable layout. These guidelines were used to produce the
electronic resume samples provided later on in this session:

Restrict the use of fonts to Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, or Helvetica.

Use only one font size, preferably between 10 and 14 points.

 Remove all underlining, bolding, and italics.

 Remove any graphics or artwork appearing on the resume including shading, vertical and
horizontal lines.
 Make sure "name" is the only item appearing on the first line of the document.
 Move all text to the left margin.
 Bulleted items can confuse scanners; convert them to simple hyphens or asterisks.

Keywords

Since electronic resumes will be stored in a database, the screening process involves a keyword
matching routine. The hiring manager describes the skills and job titles that apply to the open
position, and the human resources person queries the resume database for those same terms or
keywords. Resumes are then screened and ranked based on the matching algorithm.

The right keyword or key phrases must appear in the body of the document to make it through
the screening process. Resume keywords are the nouns and adjectives that are relevant to the
position.

In fact, their placement has become so important that it is sometimes useful to place them in the
body of the electronic resume. This can take the form of a dedicated section labeled Keyword
Summary that includes the nouns and adjectives believed to apply to the individual's work
experience or the job posting.

Electronic Resume Professional Sample

Sally A. Resume

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111 First Street, Her City, NY XXXXX (212) 555-1212

KEYWORDS

Executive, Senior Executive, Director, Accounting, Finance, Banking, Management,

Procurement, Sales, Negotiations, Business Development, Planning, Analysis

EDUCATION

B.A. Accounting, University of Connecticut 1984

M.B.A. Corporate Finance, Harvard University 1986

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS

- President, National Finance Benchmarking Association

- Certified Financial Analyst

CAREER SKILLS / KNOWLEDGE

- General Management, Operational Procedures, Procurement Operations, Budgeting /

Accountability, Regulations and Government, Business Case Development, Customer
Operations, Contract Negotiations, Workforce Planning, Direct Sales, Sales Channel
Development, Website Development

CAREER ACHIEVEMENTS

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- Founded accounting firm immediately following college graduation and grew revenue to
$3,000,000 in just under ten years.

- Honored with the Medium Company's "Employee of the Year" award for work relating to
corporate acquisitions. Over a course of five years, a total of seven companies were
acquired and in each situation the acquisition target met or exceeded all financial
projections.

- Led the development of web interface for recruiting and signing up new
customers. Pioneered the company's marketing approach to pay-per-impression and pay-
per-click online customer recruiting strategy.

WORK EXPERIENCE

Large Corporation, Large Town, NY 2012 to Present

V.P. Customer Operations: Responsible for the operations of call center, web and 16 walk
in centers employing 450 people throughout the United States.

Gained personal notoriety both within the company and throughout the industry as a
pioneer for efforts in developing a web interface to attract new customers. The growth in
customer base due to web referrals accelerated 50% in just three years.

Medium Company, New York, NY 2007 to 2012

Director New Business Development: Conducted a series of financial cost studies and
acquisitions for Medium Company. Responsible for reporting and tracking of success for
each acquisition against planned benefits.

Generated annual cost savings of nearly $250,000 while expanding product line 200%
through the integration of multiple acquisitions into master contracts with vendors,
thereby leveraging the buying power of a consolidated operation.

Accountants Are Us LLC, City Town, NJ 1997 to 2007

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Founder: Began start up accounting firm immediately following graduate school. Over
ten years grew company to $3,000,000 in annual revenues and a client base of 150
accounts. The company employed 32 full and part time accountants.

Developed an in-house auditing software program to analyze financial statements and

report discrepancies. Software program eventually sold to Quicken/ Intuit.

Careers Website

Having a careers Website is a central aspect of managing your recruiting processes— and where
you should begin if you don’t already have one in place. The goal is to attract potential candidates
to your company, build long-term relationships, assess candidate fit for open jobs, and finally
capture and process candidate information in a structured way.

With careers Website best practices in place, you can achieve a competitive edge in recruiting
the most-qualified candidates quickly and gain financial benefits from direct and opportunity cost
reductions. These practices automate recruiting activities that have a direct impact on the cost,
reach, and breadth of candidate sourcing and processing. For even the best management
practices to be effective, quality of hire and optimum fit are essential. High quality and fit of hires
translate into higher productivity and better work satisfaction, consequently producing higher
retention rates.

The following best practices for careers Websites can increase your odds of recruiting the most-
qualified candidates and can reduce direct as well as opportunity costs.

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 Give applicants anonymity. Because many potential candidates may be employed while
they search your career Website for openings, privacy and confidentiality are important.
You will need to ensure that database management, workflow rules, and recruiting
processes are aligned to protect the candidates’ anonymity.
 Tailor online applications. Online prescreening tools quickly separate qualified from
unqualified candidates based on answers to questionnaires. Instead of a generic online
application used by all candidates, you can use job-specific prescreening to adapt the
application to an open position.
 Keep track of candidate information. Candidates can create and maintain a personal
profile on your careers Website and attach job positions to their profile. The profile is then
saved in your company’s candidate database and accessed through an appropriate
password. Recruiters can view structured data about a candidate, including access to job-
specific screening questions to easily assess fit. By tracking candidate information by job,
you gather the necessary data for compliance reporting as well.
 Let job seekers and employees post your open positions on Facebook. When you
allow job seekers to post jobs on their Facebook page, you can increase the exposure of
your open positions—and reach a larger pool of candidates at lower sourcing costs. In
addition, employees are one of your best sources for referrals. Encourage them to post
open positions on their Facebook page and refer their friends.
 Highlight your company culture. Your company culture may sway a candidate’s
decision about applying for an open position. You can include information about your
company’s mission and values, industry position, facilities, and location. Making this
information available online means that recruiters don’t have to e-mail it out individually
and further brands your company as a well-regarded employer of choice.
 Enable job searches. A job search engine is a core component of a top-notch careers
Website. It helps job seekers find job openings that meet their requirements quickly and
efficiently. Making sure that current job openings are in the searchable database also
reduces the administrative burden of maintaining a manual list. The three best search
criteria are Job Search by Job Category, Job Search by Location, and Job Search by
Keyword.
 Link your careers Website to your home page. A direct link from your home page to
the careers Website makes for easy navigation and drives visitor traffic. You can also
leverage the marketing efforts of your company to get visitors to your home page.

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  Establish a memorable URL. It sounds like a simple idea, but making sure that your
career Website URL is memorable is important. By assigning an easily remembered URL,
your company promotes recruiting and ensures that job seekers won’t forget it when they
want to look for job openings at your company.
 Focus on urgent jobs. Highlighting urgent job openings can be as easy as making the
links to descriptions a different color or using a symbol such as an exclamation point. You
can also maintain a separate list that can be linked at a prominent position on your career
Website. A list of urgent jobs alerts job seekers who have the appropriate skills to apply
for those first and can help you meet your company’s high- priority recruiting goals.

Smart Sourcing

Talent acquisition costs come into play when a new position is being filled for the first time, when
an existing position is refilled due to turnover, and when employees switch jobs internally. Much
of the spend for acquiring talent is on sourcing, including recruiting agency fees and recruitment
advertising costs for new hires. It is estimated that worldwide, organizations spend upwards of a
combined $85 billion each year to source candidates.These fees typically come out of the budget
of the hiring department and may not be visible to an organization through its HR department’s
accounting of talent acquisition costs.

Using smart sourcing technologies, businesses of all sizes can get the same talent sourcing
advantages that large organizations enjoy. You can recruit faster from a wider network of qualified
candidates, build stronger relationships with active and passive job seekers, and earn a higher
return on your sourcing investments.

The following best practices for smart sourcing help you find the best person for the job while
decreasing your sourcing costs and time to hire.

 Automate job board processes. Get the most out of your job board investments with
predictive ranking and optimization capabilities. Recommend job boards with the highest
likelihood for attracting qualified talent, and automatically post to these boards.

 Build a talent pool. Reduce your dependence on third-party recruiters and external
résumé databases by keeping your own database of quality candidates. Then manage

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 candidate relationships so you can tap into this valuable resource when you have a job
opening. Candidate relationship databases lower sourcing costs by better marketing
opportunities to candidates sourced in the past.
 Plug into social networks. According to the Pew Research Internet Project, 73% of
online adults use social networking sites. As more people use social networks such as
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you can go beyond job boards. A 2012 publication by
Meisha Rouser found that 18.4 million applicants found their jobs on Facebook, 10.2
million found theirs on LinkedIn, and 8 million found theirs on Twitter.4Share your most
urgent job openings with millions of potentially qualified candidates.

Smart Screening

Online recruiting can quickly swamp recruiters and HR staff, because it is now possible for a job
seeker to apply for hundreds of jobs in a single session. With increasing applicant volume,
recruiters still have to carry out the process of selecting the most- promising candidates. Yet, the
largest block of time in the hiring cycle is typically sorting and ranking candidates based on
résumés.

Smart screening—that is, prescreening candidates by asking targeted questions—offers a cost-

effective way to have an in-house recruiting function without churning through limited financial
and employee resources. Not only will smart screening technologies quickly steer hiring
managers toward the most-promising candidates but they will also assist you in building a
repository of prequalified, ranked candidates to draw from in the future. The greatest advantage
over manual applicant processing is the speed with which recruiting decisions can be reached.
Smart screening is not just about finding employees but also about finding the most-qualified
employees.

The following best practices fo prescreening candidates are designed to help you find the
employees who—based on skills, behavior, and prior history—will fit perfectly within your
organization.

 Narrow down candidates. When you consider that in 2014, employers received in the
approximately of 85 applications for every job opening and estimate that about 60% of all
candidates that apply are unqualified, you get an idea of the amount of time “knockout
screening” can save. Knockout screening eliminates candidates who aren’t qualified for

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 the job you are looking to fill. It uses technology to assess data the merits further
consideration. You set the mandatory requirements during the requisition process, so no
human interaction is necessary.
 Assess candidate skills. You can identify top performers by analyzing the needed skills,
experience, and fit and then matching those to the talent profiles of external candidates.
This method of effective recruiting requires a streamlined process. Automated ranking and
workflow enable recruiters and hiring managers to focus on evaluating a short list of quality
candidates. A skills assessment can include any number of questions—in a series of
different formats—that the candidate answers during the application process. The goal is
to find out the applicant’s skill set and if that individual approaches a task in a suitable
manner for doing the job effectively.
 Cut your time to hire. Every applicant who passes the knockout screening process and
completes the skills assessment is scored. You can choose from the highest- scoring
applicants to move to the next step of the hiring process. To this point, your only time
investment will have been in setting up the mandatory job requirements and the
questionnaire.
 Check candidates’ backgrounds. Background screening has become increasingly
relevant in the last 10 years. The reasons for its growing popularity include the rise in
workplace violence, corporate fraud scandals, and litigation—both real and potential.
Background checks also help employers nail some of the 30 to 40 percent of job
candidates estimated to lie on their résumés.

Candidate Management

Recruiting is no longer a static event; it is about ongoing communication with people who possess
a given set of skills. Managing relationships with candidates takes time, but it’s important to deliver
a good experience, or you might lose them in the process. Candidate relationship management
and candidate communication play a critical role in identifying, developing, and sustaining long-
term relationships with candidates and existing employees.

Establishing a candidate communications process makes it easier for candidates and employees
to interact with the organization. At its best, you can use systems to streamline staffing processes
and make better staffing decisions while being responsive to candidates and internal employees.

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Tools for enhancing communication and contact can speed up the process on your end while
ensuring that the candidate has all the information needed.

The following best practices will help you more easily manage candidates and improve their
experience.

 Have candidates create profiles. The relationship with a candidate begins when an
online job application is completed for an immediate job opening or a candidate profile is
submitted to see if there are other open requisitions that suit a candidate’s skills and
interests. Candidates can be immediately notified via e-mail that their application has been
received and can view the status of their application throughout the entire staffing process.
 Automate response management. Candidates can receive notification and status
updates every time they apply for positions within the corporation or when they update
their profile. Today, job seekers expect an acknowledgement after submitting an online
application.
 Provide status updates. During the hiring process, candidates can be kept apprised of
their status and may apply for as many positions as they like without resubmitting their
information.
 Communicate directly with candidates. You can periodically send messages to the
candidate pool on an ad hoc basis or to the entire database of candidates.

Compliance Management

Compliance is a major part of your recruiting, hiring, and performance evaluation processes. It’s
not only about automating and streamlining but also about documenting and archiving to ensure
that you are capturing the data you need in order to maintain compliance with regulatory agencies
or internal policies and procedures.

The following best practices in compliance management will help you track your recruiting and
hiring initiatives and report on them.

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  ncrease transparency. A recruiting solution ensures that you execute proper notification
and advertising of open positions—a requirement for public sector agencies and
educational organizations.
 Automate reporting and ensure online privacy. The U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requires proper notification and reporting about job
openings, screening, compensation, and other HR practices. In addition, many
government agencies in the U.S. and Europe require that all information be kept private
and not be distributed. An online recruiting solution can automate reporting processes and
ensure that all information is confidential, while reducing your costs.
 Define basic qualifications. Enforce use of job templates to ensure consistency in how
you post positions. Make sure basic qualifications are specific, objective, and measurable.
Document and communicate evaluation criteria and processes, which will help you
establish your applicant pool.
 Track expressions of interest. Create, document, and communicate company selection
policies and processes. Communicating a clear definition of expressions of interest and
consideration is critical for identifying who is an applicant and who is not.
 Track candidate status. Automatically track the candidate through the workflow process.
It’s important to track the steps and status and capture the reason a candidate is no longer
being considered for a position. This information is then available for compliance reporting.
 Ensure proper certifications and qualifications. Automated prescreening and
background checks help you determine whether candidates meet the basic qualifications
outlined for the job.
 Safeguard against charges of bias. Some employers struggle to apply federal job
mandates consistently. Smart screening technologies rectify this, by retaining a record of
each applicant’s assessment. These technologies also safeguard employers by proving
that each applicant was asked the same set of questions.

Summary

You may not have the human resources staff or budget that larger companies have for recruiting.
For activities ranging from setting up a branded careers Website to leveraging social networks
and using smart screening technologies to automate processes, Web- based solutions offer ease
of use, increased efficiency, and dramatically lower costs. Investing on a solution such as Oracle
Taleo Business Edition Cloud Service enables HR professionals to automate recruitment and

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staffing activities for improved candidate quality, efficient hiring, increased workforce productivity,
and strategic advantage.

Learning activity 1

Read the following uploaded notes:

1. EHRM and Technology

2. Case Study of Nike’s e Recruitment
3. How Deloitte Uses Social Media in e Recruitment

Learning Activity 2

Go through the following Powerpoints:

1. Web Based e Recruitment

2. Recruitment-Print-Online-Social Media
3. E Recruiting- Case Presentation
4. Applicant Tracking

Learning Activity 3

View the following videos:

1. Facebook Recruiting Video: what do you

think?at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBmHv84NM5o
2. Facebook Careers at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEMzRUQKKY8
3. SutiHR - Online Recruitment Management Software
at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LiumLGxFe0
4. e Recruitment Strategy Online Recruitment Techniques for Hiring Winners
at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0tfwH_11HU

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 Session 5

Advertise your job openings and

Broadcast To Jobseekers

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Learning Outcomes

On completion of this session, you will be able to:

1. Identify the various benefits of online job advertising compared to traditional offline job
advertising
2. Examine the salient or critical features or components which must be included when using
online job advertising.
3. Examine some best practices or guidelines to be used when using online job advertising.

1.0 Introduction

The right person is out there, but the hard part is finding them. Traditional recruitment advertising
can be costly and slow, and can stop your business from growing at the pace you would like it to.

The aim of all businesses is to recruit staff successfully and quickly. Effective online recruitment
advertising is the tool to help you achieve this result, ensuring that you are generating the right
candidates for your company.

2.0 Benefits of Online Recruitment Advertising

The following are some key benefits on online job advertising compared to traditional newspaper
job advertising:

1. Wider Reach

If you’re using an agency, you may be limiting yourself to just one channel. Managing your own
recruitment advertising online means you have the chance to gain exposure to a huge range of
job seekers.

Let’s put it into perspective: an agency will have its own network (or ‘black book’ of contacts) and
may use a couple of job boards themselves to source talent for you, However, they lack the buying
power to use a range of online resources to give you a breadth of exposure.

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By using a number of advertising sources, such as the job boards, Indeed (the site that pops up
at the top when you conduct a search using Google) or LinkedIn, you’re able to increase your
chances of your advert being in the right place at the right time – in environments ripe with active
jobseekers.

Of course, it will depend on the type of job you are attempting to fill, but online advertising is
flexible – it gives you the ability to chop and change the resources you are using to gain a wider
breadth of people coming through. The better use of resources and the wider the reach, the more
chance you have of finding the right people.

2. Better Reporting

If you want to know where your best talent is coming from and make more informed recruitment
decisions, it’s best to report on your hiring processes. Reporting means obtaining key data and
insights which allow you to monitor the progress of your recruitment campaigns.

Recruitment advertising enables you to use metrics such as application by device, source of
application and source of interviewed and placed candidates. This provides you with the
information you need to know regarding where the best applicants are coming from. (You can get
this info from the job boards themselves or through your recruitment solutions provider)

In turn, the strategies you use to source and attract candidates will develop to find the right people,
faster.

3. Faster Hiring

The time it takes you to hire a new candidate should be at the forefront of how you analyse your
recruitment processes.

The more effective your online advertising, the quicker you can attract candidates to your job
vacancies. This results in a reduced time-to-hire, allowing you to continue to build your team and
develop your business. There are many ways online advertising can help you to attract good

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candidates quickly – for example, how you write your advert to ensure it is found by active
candidates, what time of day you post your vacancy – the list is endless.

4. More for Your Money

Online advertising compared to traditional advertising means more for your money, and
candidates are able to view and apply for your roles 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Elements such as branded job advertisements and targeted jobseekers are only a couple of
features of what job boards can offer in the way of online recruitment, and when compared to the
cost of print advertising, it’s clear where the financial advantages lie.

5. It’s Easy to Use

Vacancies can be added to a site so your jobs are advertised quickly, and you can start to receive
applications as soon as possible. All you need is a job advert – as many providers automate their
services, which means they can effectively publish your job instantly to a network of websites

Your applications and vacancy management processes become much more manageable and
trackable, so you know exactly what’s happening with your recruitment advertising campaigns.

Let’s Talk Technology

With the above in mind, it’s worth talking about the recruitment software that’s available, which
works with your business to enhance the end-to-end process.

Recruitment software (such as an applicant tracking system – or ATS) helps you to measure and
manage your recruitment activity, enabling you to take full control of your hiring.

Applications are sent straight to your system, allowing you to view and manage them with ease.
An ATS can also enable you to keep these candidate details in a straight forward talent pool, so
you can re-visit applicants’ profiles for your future roles.

From custom reporting, to branded communications, it’s worth taking a look at how an ATS can
make your recruitment much more manageable.

3.0 What Every Job Advert Needs

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Attracting the right people is the time-consuming objective of many a hiring manager, which is
why your recruitment advertising strategies need to be on point.

Part of this is your job advertisements, which can influence a candidate’s decision on whether to
apply to your vacancy or not. Therefore, you want adverts that will get the right attention.

When it comes to creating a successful recruitment advertising campaign, there are key aspects
that must be considered. The following are some key areas to look at what your job advert needs
to avoid deterring potential applicants.

1. Job Introduction

Begin the advert with a paragraph introducing the role. Try not to talk about the company too
much at this point, as the individual viewing the ad will want to know from the beginning if this is
a job for them.

Keep the job introduction short, and remember that it helps the potential candidate to assess as
to whether they should keep on reading.

2. Company Information

A simple, straight forward introduction to your company should also be near the start of your
advert. Ensure that this information is a clear indication of what your business does.

Too many clichés aren’t always the best idea, with 100s of companies labelling themselves as
‘dynamic’ or ‘fast growing’. You want to attract individuals, but try not to imitate what many are
already doing so stay factual and to the point.

3. Salary

You may not want to give away the salary; however keeping it vague may mean an influx of
candidates who aren’t at the right level.

You can minimise the amount of irrelevant applications if the salary or salary banding is
mentioned, adverts without a salary typically get around 70% less applicants. Look to include any
rewards or benefits near the salary information, to show exactly what’s on offer.

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4. Skills & Experience

List only the essential skills that are required, and a few desirables if needs be. The longer the list
of skills you place on the advert, the more candidates that will be put off.

Focusing on the must-have experience and skills allows a greater focus on exactly what is
needed, whereas a long list of desirables can detract from what is important. You want the right
candidates, so be clear on precisely what it is that is needed for the position.

5. Responsibilities

List the job responsibilities, and keep these to a minimum. Any further details should be included
in the job description which is a secondary document. It helps to link these to business objectives,
for applicants to understand their role in the company.

Responsibilities, along with skills and experience, should be under clear sections, providing an
easy-to-read job advert. This allows candidates to easily skip to different parts of the ad.

6. How to Apply

State clearly what candidates should do to apply: this can be placed at both the top and bottom
of the advert. Whether it’s an apply button or an email address to send their CV to, make sure
this is on the advert in a position that can be seen.

Job adverts are a two-way street. Candidates are searching for vacancies, yet employers should
seek to appeal to their audience. Look at it from the other side, why should they work for you?

Consider the length of the advert. It should summarise the information for applicants, and
shouldn’t be as long as the job description, which should list the full details of the role.

You can always show the advert to your colleagues, to get a wider perspective on how punchy it
should be. Remember, applicants need to know the necessary information, but the more succinct,
the better.

Online recruitment advertising is a fast and effective method which allows you to get your role in
front of thousands of candidates. It’s also a low cost one; which can be measured and therefore
improved, to continually deliver better results.

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4.0 Further Tips for Online Job Advertising Effectiveness

The recruitment advertising landscape can appear daunting for many, shrouded in jargon and
mixed reviews; so it’s natural it can seem a challenge to be certain of what’s what and where to
begin.

This step-by-step guide outlines a simple way of approaching your recruitment advertising. It
includes tips on writing the perfect copy, how to select your advertising mix, and considerations
around branding and the inclusion of application landing pages.

An effective job advertisement is vital in helping you to successfully attract staff. It will be the first
taster of the job for potential employees and will contain information that may be the deciding
factor for whether they apply for your vacancy or not.

There is often confusion around how a job advert differs to a job description or specification. Put
simply, a job advert is a concise overview; it should be enticing and is intended to sell the role,
whilst still providing the key information that candidates will wishto know about before applying
for your vacancy.

Many people take the task of writing their job adverts lightly, thinking it will be a breeze.

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Having worked in the recruitment advertising sector for over a decade, we can say with confidence
that getting your advertisement right is key to attracting not just the quantity but also the quality
you need.

Each advert that you create for your business is worth taking the time over, but with pressure to
get roles live fast it helps to know some best practices to follow from the outset to make the
process swifter.

Compiled by our own in-house team of recruitment advertising copywriters, we recommend

following these 8 best practices every time you write a recruitment advert:

1. Include the salary

Many companies choose to leave salaries off their job adverts; however they could be greatly
reducing their chances of finding the right candidate. In fact, job advertisements without salaries
listed can have up to a 70% reduction in applications.

Not only do salaries act as an attraction factor, they also act as a guideline to whether a candidate
is at the right level for a job - it is a salary scale that normally rules a candidate in or out when
considering a role.

2. Use of your company’s language

Don’t over use in-house terminology that someone outside your company wouldn’t understand

 be clear and concise. Stay away from jargon or any confusing terms – the chances are, if
a candidate doesn’t understand what your company does or what they’ll be doing in the
role, they probably won’t apply.

Of course, you’ll need to use/conform to your internal brand guidelines - but avoid complicated
wording.

3. Avoid ‘quirky’ job titles

Quirky or in-house job titles may seem fun but most people search for roles on job boards using
keywords. Therefore it’s best to use generic terms.

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You can call the applicant whatever you want when they start in the company but stick with
something more general for advertising purposes.

Whilst ‘Chair Development Master’ might sound like an appealing title, the suitable candidates for
the role are more likely to search for the term ‘Carpenter’.

4. Details versus company information

It’s great to know who you will be working for, but more importantly candidates want to know what
they would be doing in their role at your company. Keep the balance between the two weighted
in favour of role information.

With an increasing skills shortage across some industries, employers are having to work harder
and harder to attract candidates so the information that you include about the role will be vital.

5. Include the benefits

If your company offers awesome benefits, make sure that you include them and go into detail.
This is particularly important for high calibre jobs, where great benefits packages are often equally
as important as the salary.

If you offer flexible working, on-site parking, gym memberships or anything of this nature these
are definitely worth mentioning in your job advertisement.

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 6. Don’t overkill on the skills

Many businesses compile a long list of essential requirements when trying to recruit staff.
However, try and leave it as open as possible and limit yourself to five requirements. For instance,
do they really need experience of using a certain software programme if they can be trained on it
easily?

7. Avoid reverse tactics

Try not to use negative language in your job adverts as this will create a negative impression of
your company. For example, don’t state “No telesales applicants”. Instead, why not tailor your
language to attract the people you want to apply?

If the role really wouldn’t be suitable for someone from a telesales background, for example, just
ask for ‘face to face sales experience’ as an essential requirement. Focus on including
candidates, not excluding candidates.

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8. Excessive information

Whilst providing information about the role is good, candidates don’t need to hear about tiny parts
of the role such as that they’ll be assisting with general housekeeping activities and attending a
meeting every month.

These are pretty generic duties so don’t waste valuable ad space by talking about them.

Remember, when advertising online, you have just a few crucial seconds to catch candidates’
attention so don’t waste them.

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Assessing the market place

So, you’ve constructed your job advert and are happy it’s ready to go, now the question you
face is where to advertise it?

It has been reported that jobseekers use, on average, a total of 16 different sources when
searching for a role. This statistic – from the Candidate Behaviour Survey by Careerbuilder –
highlights the importance of using a range of complementary resources to advertise your jobs
to ensure the best level of reach.

The big players - new advertising sources are always popping up, and the market is getting
very, very busy, here are just a few titles

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Taking a step back and looking at the suppliers you are currently using. The reason behind this
step is to ascertain whether or not you are getting the real value you need and decide if it is time
to search for an alternative supplier better suited to your needs.

When looking at these suppliers, it is fundamental to remember what calibre/type of candidates

these sources can deliver, and the level of resource required from you to achieve the best value.

Deciding where to post your vacancy

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This step involves developing the sourcing strategy for each campaign type. i.e. choosing which
mix of advertising tools will present you with the best outcome.

There’s a common misconception that to achieve the best response, you need to use hundreds
of job boards. This mass reach, it’s often thought, will get the best responses. This couldn’t be
further from the truth. Use too many irrelevant boards, and you’ll spend half your time wading
through irrelevant applicants.

Your choice of job boards and sources to post on will determine how quickly you can attract the
right type of candidates for your vacancies; therefore, it pays to do your research.

You may also want to see what resources your competitors are using, and to what level, to get
an indication of potential success you could achieve.

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Here we share with you some of the key questions to ask and things to consider when setting up
contracts with suppliers (as used by our in-house recruitment co-ordinator):

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Changes or amendments to your adverts

Before your campaign is live, don’t forget to ask what you can do regarding making changes to
your advertisement. Making amendments to your campaign to influence the response is an easy
solution that has the potential to dramatically improve its performance.

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Job posting duration

Successfully managing recruitment can seem like a balancing act, especially if you find yourself
working on roles with numerous posting durations.

Things can quickly change when it comes to required start dates, therefore, it is worth considering
how long you may need to run your recruitment campaigns for.

For these occasions, job boards that can offer a short, single vacancy posting option can be a
better option for your business instead of agreeing to a long term contract on an untested job
board.

Database availability

Job boards and aggregators can attract hundreds of thousands of candidates every day; and may
have an impressive talent pool, offered via a CV database.

Find out what access you can have to this talent, as it may contain the perfect candidate for your
role.

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Being able to search this talent bank and approach candidates directly is an excellent way to
make good use of job boards for your recruitment process.

Branding your recruitment advertising (i.e. including your business’ company brand) and
enhancing your application processes can transform the success of your hiring campaigns in a
number of ways.

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The ability to brand your job adverts – whether that’s including your logo, referencing your
company name, or including unique URL links – allows you to personalise your recruitment
campaigns and better control how your company is portrayed to jobseekers.

There are multiple ways in which you can give your recruitment advertising campaign that little
something extra to help it stand out from the crowd. One of the most powerful of these is by
including your employer in various parts of the process.

Putting your company’s stamp on your recruitment campaigns allows you to communicate the
features that set your business apart from your competitors.

Your reputation plays a vital role in your mission to attract the best possible talent and, if you have
a great brand, candidates are more likely to want to work for you.

Using just your advertisement and existing resources, here are 3 ways to best showcase your
brand.

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1. Your recruitment advert copy

Recruitment adverts are the ideal place in which to communicate your brand values, identity and
culture. (Don’t forget what we covered in section 2; include this but keep it concise).

Are you a fun, laid back organisation? Mention your office environment, employees, ethos and
benefits. Or perhaps you have a more corporate culture. If so, make sure that you highlight your
achievements, your company’s vision and the career paths that you offer.

2. Integrate your recruitment activities within social media

We all know about the importance of advertising on job boards, aggregators and professional
networks, such as LinkedIn. But don’t forget about social media platforms, such as Twitter and
Facebook.

Your social media accounts are the perfect platform to promote your vacancies and showcase
how great your brand is to your already existing fan base.

If you’re a B2C brand, it is expected you’ll have amassed a great following on sites such as
Facebook or Instagram, so when sharing your jobs – think about how to position them in a way
to entice your existing followers.

3. Email communications

So, your vacancy has received dozens of applications and candidates are aware of how brilliant
you are. But what can you do from there?

When communicating with candidates via email, make sure that you use your company’s colours
and logo. This will allow candidates to instantly recognise your brand.

In your updates to applicants, try to use language that’s consistent with your business.

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Keep it professional at all times but if you’re a laid back organisation, reflect this through using
more relaxed language. If you’re a corporate business, keep it formal.

It’s also a great idea to include a link to your company’s ‘work for us’ page (if you have one) on
your website so candidates can familiarise themselves with your culture and values, if they haven’t
already.

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So you’ve got your advert live on the platforms you’ve selected but what happens when your
candidates hit apply? They can apply via the board, or via your recruitment advertising partner of
course, but another option is to send them to a branded landing page.

Landing pages offer uniformity, ensuring all your candidates see the same messaging and
branding.

When candidates click the ‘apply’ button, rather than being directly re-routed through an unfamiliar
system, a landing page will ensure that your logo and company colours are present.

This will allow candidates to feel secure that they are applying for your role and aren’t being routed
through a completely separate, potentially unsecure website.

Landing pages do require a good level of technical knowledge (dependent upon your, style
guideline requirements). They can either follow a template and be branded to match your
company or you can have unique styling requested. It is not necessary to have a recruitment
software system in place, as once applicants hit your landing page they can be filtered to your
inbox or via a supplier’s candidate management system.

Landing pages which also include an application form embedded within the page are an excellent
way to streamline your recruitment process, as well as gaining greater control over your filtering
capabilities.

If you do opt to include an application form in your campaigns be careful not to get carried away
with a lengthy form; these are very off putting for busy jobseekers. What’s more, you run the risk
of your candidates dropping out of your application process and getting snapped up by
competition due to this.

Keeping your application form short and focused, don’t ask applicants to repeat basic information.
Instead use it to include job specific questions that will aid you to identify stronger candidates.

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Again, recruitment software is not always necessary for application forms as these can still be
filtered straight to your inbox, but there are great benefits of linking your application forms with a
recruitment software system when it comes to the filtering stage.

Having mastered the art of writing an effective job advert, assessed and selected the perfect
advertising mix and added on any additional features, you should have a great campaign ready
to go.

Determining if your campaign was a success is often focused on the simple fact of did you make
a good hire? Quality of hire is one thing, but infact there are many other metrics you should be
looking at.

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Applicant tracking systems can track numerous data around your campaigns, but there are ways
to do this manually.

You can also get free reporting from your recruitment supplier – it’s in their interest to arm you
with the information to help you long-term.

1. Overall time to hire

Time is critical; not only does it equate to money but the longer it takes you to hire, the bigger the
impact it will have on your business.

You can calculate your time to hire by noting the period of time between the date that you first
advertised your vacancy and the date that your new hire started within your business.

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For a more accurate representation, try and do this for 10 different roles (alter this figure
depending on your recruitment volume) and take an average.

2. Overall time to hire

You can calculate your cost to hire by working out the expenditure associated with each
recruitment campaign – from any advertising rates to the cost to your business for a hiring
manager to sit in interviews for the afternoon.

Similar to calculating your time to hire, try and work out an average cost over a number of roles.
This is your overall cost to hire figure.

3. Cost to hire per job board

You probably used a cluster of job boards for each vacancy that you advertise. However, how
can you be sure that you’re getting true value?

Take the monthly cost of each job board that you use and divide it by the number of hires that
you’ve made using that specific board. This is a great way of figuring out the value of your
recruitment advertising so that you can eliminate any under-performing boards, thus reducing
your overall cost to hire.

4. Application Source

Finding out the source of your applications is vital – this metric will tell you where you’re getting
the greatest number of applications, as well as where your quality applications are coming from.
If you want figures purely based on volume, divide your total number of applications for each
vacancy by the number of applicants from each source (LinkedIn, your own talent pool, referrals,
job boards etc.)However, if you want to focus on quality applicants, try dividing the number of
applicants that you’ve hired over the past year by the number of shortlisted applicants from each
recruiting source

 one platform could give you 100 applicants for a role but if none of these are suitable, then
why should you use it again?

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5. Social media conversions

Sure, you might have thousands of Twitter followers and a killer Marketing team who plug your
latest vacancy several times a day but who’s to say that potential candidates are actually clicking
through? The number of followers that you have for each social media platform does not
necessarily correlate with how effective they are at advertising your vacancy.

Divide your number of click through for each platform by your number of followers to get a true
indication of how many people are engaged. This will give you an indication of which platform you
should be focusing your candidate attraction efforts on in order to successfully recruit staff.

Constantly tracking these 5 metrics is a great way to increase the efficiency of your recruitment
advertising campaigns and will give you the confidence to know where to invest your spend to
increase your success in the future.

Tracking all of these metrics around recruitment advertising without an applicant tracking system
in place can be a challenge; if you are considering the benefits that they can deliver your reporting
capabilities read this blog for some further guidance.

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This guide has focused on providing hiring managers with a behind the scenes look at each stage
involved in successfully running a recruitment advertising campaign.

Online recruitment advertising is a competitive market, with new jobs being published every day
and thousands of jobseekers searching for new opportunities. This behaviour means

businesses need to raise their standards when it comes to advertising to ensure they stand out
from the crowd.

Taking the time to craft the perfect job advert is more important than ever, jobseekers can happily
choose to dismiss a role if it is unclear or lacks the information they care most about.

Better reporting on the response to recruitment campaigns allows you to dig deeper and
understand the value of your suppliers and make improvement to gain the best return on
investment from them.

With this said, we understand that not every business may wish to manage their own recruitment
advertising, but by reading this guide we hope that the insight it provides will give you a greater
understanding of the process behind recruitment advertising and how you can ensure your
recruitment advertising partner is delivering you with the best service.

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Learning Activity 1

Read the uploaded notes:

1. Douglas and Grahame Case Study

2. Peak Posting Performance
3. The Ultimate Online Guide for Recruitment

Learning activity 2

Go through the following PowerPoints:

1. Intro to Online Advertising by Greg Stuart

2. Online Advertising

Learning Activity 3

View the following videos:

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1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of recruiting on the
Internet?at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUQnLQ9SSDs

2. Online Advertising For Beginners | Best Ways To Advertise Online

at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_BLVeYYuhc

3. Monster Job Ad: Reach and attract the best candidates online
at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyScYtB8sY8

4. Total Talent Reach Online Job Postings at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nhIQwAsZ9M

5. Recruitment Best Practices by Stuart Hedley, CEB

at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjsjo_Ofj-0

Learning Activity 4

Attempt the Self Test

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