As technology inevitably marches onwards it has become clear that even the most cutting-edge solutions are no longer the reserve of dedicated recruitment agencies. The fact is when it comes to attracting, employing and inducting new talent, if there is a chance of stealing a march on the opposition, employers are as keen for a piece of the high-tech recruitment action as their agency and consultant counterparts.

Post haste
“The last year has probably been the most challenging for online recruitment in a decade,” says Damian Newland, business development manager at Burning Glass Technologies. “One of the big changes we’ve seen is the increase in the use of online recruitment by direct resourcers who are now doing more posting, sourcing and searching.”
“As little as 12 months ago we saw the direct resourcing teams playing catch up with the use of technology that had become commonplace amongst agencies,” he continues.
“Now, no doubt driven by cost and performance pressures there’s been a real hunger for innovation to achieve more in terms of outcome with often significantly less budget.”
According to Newland, however, this hasn’t been a straightforward case of increased competition among recruiters. Changes in the talent pool have also driven adjustments in recruitment practice: “With a growing number of jobseekers the applications have both increased in frequency and decreased in quality,” he says.
“As a consequence, there’s a demand for smarter tools to sift out inappropriate candidates and enable the recruiters to focus in on the strongest ones.”
Increased applications are no doubt due in part to the recession, placing more people in the market for fewer jobs, but that same recession has left recruiters with less resources to actually sift applicants to make appointments or referrals; and it should not be forgotten that the overall cost of recruiting and inducting someone into an organisation means getting the candidate right first time has never been more important.
“When the bottom fell out of the market 18 months ago, recruiters suddenly felt they had no money and with candidates ten-a-penny they decided to stick with what they had,” believes David Johnston sales director at Hot Lizard.
“But in some cases that meant being left with a tired website that didn’t feature in any search engines and hardly got any traffic.”
“From a recruitment point of view getting those basics right is the most important thing you can do,” Johnston concludes.

Applicant friendly
Johnston’s point is that in this era of social (and not so social) networks, Twitter and LinkedIn, there is a huge temptation for recruiters to start trying to key into these diverse online resources despite any poor record they may have on managing their own website or email processes.
“Their own site needs to be easy to find and make it easy to apply,” says Johnston, “You can’t start using feeds from Twitter or anywhere else unless those core principles are right.”
The development of mobile recruitment websites is high on the agenda for Hot Lizard, although Johnston admits some moves in this area seem to be less than successful at this point. "We're spending a lot of time looking at what you can do with mobile websites,” he says, “but just making them versions of the main site means they can be pretty painful to navigate.”
In this area at least, the emphasis is on pushing recruitment content to the available talent rather than doing anything specifically new. By being accessible to the candidate wherever that candidate may be the recruiter can hope to increase the chances of an application from a golden candidate who may otherwise be too busy to seek out or complete the application process.
To this end, Hays have already introduced their own iPhone application that enables a search of the Hays website for roles by location, keyword, salary and job type. Users can even view job specifications and complete an application through the same device: “Candidates are looking for speed and ease in their online job search and the introduction of the iPhone application is one way of addressing these needs,” notes Tim Cook, managing director of Hays UK and Ireland.
To an extent, however, the need to attract candidates is far less than the need to identify the right candidate.
If Damian Newland’s analysis of the current talent pool is correct, organisations do not necessarily want to open themselves up to more candidates as much as find a way of identifying the right candidate from those they already have. Jason Pierce, managing director at Skillsarena believes this factor has made some contribution to the increase in employers taking up recruitment directly for themselves.
It seems relatively easy for consultants and agencies to throw 20 candidates at a given position - and even if those candidates have been carefully selected it still leaves the employer with the task of vetting those suggestions, and even then finding the person they want is not among them.
Skillsarena’s technology is intended to make this sifting process easier. By creating online testing and assessment exercises candidates can effectively self-select out of the recruitment process, taking the guess work out of deciding whether someone could actually do a job or not.
“Historically you’d get a job by sending a CV - which is good for background but will probably have been rewritten for every job application,” explains Pierce.
“Then you'd have an interview where the candidate would be well presented and you might offer them a job on the basis of that interview. It’s only when they turn up for work that you'd actually discover they couldn't do your job.”
A job-based skills assessment programme, argues Pierce, doesn’t just reveal whether someone with apparently the right background can do the task, it will also reveal if someone who may not otherwise be considered could do the job: “If you have someone who has never had exposure to a role in sales or in HR, or if they’ve never applied for such a role, you’ll never know if they’d be good at that job,” he says.
“They might actually have the right outlook and skills and be phenomenal.”

Maximising talent
This approach to assessment can have particular benefits when applied to the internal talent pool of an organisation. A large company will have hundreds of opportunities at any one time, but while they may be good at internal promotion those promotions might only occur within each function.
By assessing and benchmarking staff it is possible to liberate those individuals to switch between functions, driving more value from the internal talent pool than ever before.
The test and assessment approach is supported by Christian Hasenoehrl, a partner at Gallop. “A talent based selection approach speeds up the process and makes it more accurate,” he says.
When some organisations receive 50,000 applications for just 200 graduate positions it seems clear technology is the only way in which one can hope to do justice to those applications. Not only can online testing offer a clear and legitimate method of assessment, it can be set up and left to run for a number of months, enabling candidates to log in and make their application at a time that suits them.
Incorporating psychometric elements into the process means feedback from the test has benefits for employer and potential employee. “Even if a candidate isn't successful they value the process because it gives them a sense of introspection,” says Hasenoehrl.
“They have a greater sense of what the organisation is about and they know more about themselves.”

This dual payoff is now what recruiters should be looking for from any technology they use in the recruitment process: everybody knows technology will speed up the recruitment process for the recruiter, but what’s in it for the candidate?
Team24 specialise in placing healthcare and nursing staff and according to Tonya Hills, director of IT and innovation, without technology the agency would not have been able to survive, let alone expand as it has.
“Nurses have to produce around 20 different documents to register for employment,” says Hills, “We were holding around 60 separate documents for every nurse on our books.”
All required paperwork is now scanned and stored on the system, negating the need for applicants to produce all their documents at once.
The system automatically tracks each new application with the result that if a candidate phones up they can be given an instant status report rather than being told to expect a call back after the recruiter has traced all the necessary information.
In general, candidates don’t need to make those kinds of calls however, because the system will automatically send them text messages to let them know how their application is progressing. Even references are automatically generated - whether through sending e-mails or faxes or even through the use of an automatic envelope stuffing machine.
Notwithstanding the latter, the system is entirely paperless and is also web-based so any recruiter with the correct logging-in details can access their part of the site from any computer wherever they are stationed.

“The fact that we can work remotely has opened all sorts of new avenues,” says Hills, “and we’ve had clear efficiency gains - even in an area that’s very complicated and where a complete audit trail is required.”
Hills and her colleagues have taken an approach which means assessing the technology that is out there for the benefits it brings to recruiters and to their candidates - accepting anything that enhances their relationship. Even if - as Damian Newland suggests - employers are trying to compete directly with independent recruiters through the adoption of similar technologies it is the recruiter/candidate relationship that will determine the success or otherwise of the recruitment function.
“It’s about building up relationships,” says Hot Lizard’s David Johnston. “It’s easy to attract candidates but difficult to get the best candidates. Technology will be relatively cheap in the next few years but recruiters will need to use it to offer new levels of services.”
With job boards, candidate data bases and CV parsing now run of the mill, Johnston believes recruiters will start providing performance related services or higher value added packages above and beyond what is generally possible through adopting the most accessible technology.
Whether technology leads recruitment to mobile phones and handheld computers, to text messaging, testing and beyond it is clear new models of selling the recruitment process will be required to match these advances over the next few years.