e recruitment

A

andie2385

Abhi Gupta
E-recruitment in
Web 2.O boost

Online recruitment is moving into the Web 2.0
world, with a new service from Chinwag Jobs
that uses online personalisation technology and
behavioural targeting techniques.
Chinwag claims that the service will offer
users a targeted iist of recommended vacancies
based on previous jobs they have viewed. It says
the service, provided by PositiveFeedback, will
give job seekers fuller and faster access to vacan-
cies that are relevant to them.
The service aims to improve navigation
around its website using real-time behavioural
targeting, as opposed to keyword or tag-based
searches, Tbis means that Chinwag can infer
what jobs people are looking for and present
them with vacancies based on the jobs other can-
didates like them are looking at.
Chinwag is the first recruitment site to use
personalisation techniques, which bave been
pioneered by large online retailers such as Ama-
zon with their "people who bought x also bought
y" service.
Sam Michel, Chinwag's managing director,
says: "PositiveFeedback's online personalisa-
I ion service makes it easier for our users to fin
turther opportunities, expanding their options
by recommending alternative vacancies that are
specific to their requirements."
Online recruitment is a burgeoning sector.
According to the 2006 National Online Recruit-
ment Audience Survey (Noras), the online
recruitment industry in the UK is now worth
more than ?200m, almost double its value in 2005
According to Noras, some 79% of respon-
dents had applied for work electronically, with
43% e-mailing their CV to an employer and 28%
completing an online application, Just 6% of
respondents put a hard-copy CV in the post.
Tim Elkington. managing director of
Enhance Media, which manages Noras, says:
"This is a great idea. As job-boards become more
competitive, any service that eliminates the need
to search thousands of vacancies can only bene-
fit users and job sites. Jobseekers don't want to
search swathes of vacancies, they want to see rel-
evant vacancies. This product is excellent news."
Elkington says that any functionality which
makes the user experience easier and more effec-
tive is a welcome development and can only be
a fillip for online recruitment. "Tbe standard
price of online recruitment ad space is relatively
small, therefore any tools that add sophistica-
tion could enable job sites to increase the amotmt
they charge and so buHd value."
Paul Cook, founder of PositiveFeedback,
adds: "We process behavioural data to fmd sim-
ilar jobs in real-time. This enables Chinwag to
provide imniediate and relevant recommenda-
tions to their users. Personalisation systems
have, until now, been traditionally used by large
e-commerce organisations. Our new pay-per-rec-
ommendation model opens up the technology to
a wide range of industries."
Elkington concludes that Chinwag's new
service is "the first of many Web 2,0 developments
we will see in the online recruitment industry".
 
Planning for an online environment
Leicester City Council employs some 16,500 staff
with some 900 job vacancies each year. Prior
to the introduction of the e-recruitment system,
about 3,500 paper-based recruitment packs were
despatched each week.
In 2002, a team comprising departmental person-
nel of?cers, recruitment managers, the Council’s
internal Job Shop and advertising agency together
with members of the web team at Leicester City
Council began their quest for an online recruitment
solution, with the aim of improving customer
access and ef?ciency of back end processes.
At that time, all job applications were based on
paper forms with applicants either telephoning the
Council to request a pack or calling during of?ce
hours to collect one. All job packs were sent out
second class mail to help reduce costs, but this
meant that they could take at least three days to
arrive. Disabled applicants often had to wait even
longer to receive packs in a format to meet their
particular needs. Jobs were typically advertised in
the Council’s own bulletin and in the local newspa-
per, but if the ideal candidates didn’t see either of
these, they missed the job, and the Council missed
them. There was no mechanism for the Council
to proactively send job details to people who were
interested. These problems were compounded by
an overwhelming demand from customers to be
able to apply online for Council vacancies.
At that time there were no off-the-shelf
e-recruitment systems available for local govern-
ment. Leicester decided to bite the bullet and go
for a ‘from scratch’ development. A speci?cation
was prepared and sent to a number of potential
suppliers; Abacus e-Media was selected and thus
began the development of what was to become
the Recruit e-recruitment product, which has
now been installed not only for Leicester but also
for a number of other councils including Suffolk,
Derbyshire, Croydon, Devon and Bournemouth.

Recruit rolls out
Abacus put far more time into the development
of the system than we had expected. They talked
with all the key stakeholders and gained an
in-depth understanding of what was needed.
This combination of user experience and Abacus’
technical expertise has been fundamental to the
success of e-recruitment at Leicester.”
STEVE SCOTT, WEB MANAGER AT LEICESTER
Recruit has been designed to handle every stage
of the recruitment process from initial preparation
of job speci?cations and advertising, through to
short listing, reference letters and production of
contracts. In addition, its ‘back-end’ functions
provide vacancy tracking, auditing and reporting
capabilities.
Once initial development was completed, Abacus
worked with Leicester to trial the new system,
enhance its usability and then phase its implemen-
tation. At the same time, the Council employed
a market research organisation to evaluate the
most effective promotional techniques for the
new Leicester Jobs Shop web site, and to design a
campaign to promote the main benefits of working
in local government.
Recruit stores all advertisements (including
job descriptions and discrimination clauses) in
a database for potential re-use. Once a record has been created, Recruit provides workflow
dashboards’ for each department, to ensure that
all the necessary steps are undertaken, including
approval by personnel, selection of media and
allocation of advertisement display dates by the
advertisement department, and display on the
web site and in the job shop. When ready, the
advertisements are automatically displayed on
the web site to coincide with the release to the
printed media.

Assessing the benefits
Our recruitment activity has been completely
transformed by Recruit. We now provide a more
customer-focused service where people can
register with the site for future vacancies, submit
online forms, save a copy – and they can do this
at whatever time best suits them, day or night.
The former manual process has been radically
transformed into an electronic workflow with key
monitoring functions that pick up productivity
levels, delays and provide audit trail changes to
formal documents.”
SHILPA ARYA
Usage of the web site has more than doubled over
the last two years. Twenty two thousand active
registered users receive emails when jobs that
match their interests are advertised, and the site
typically attracts 24,000 users each month. The
number of online applications received by the
Council per job has also doubled from ten in 2004
to 20 in 2006. 85% of all job applications are now
received online.
It has been surprising that many jobs, such as
cleaners and kitchen assistants, attract almost
100% of applications online. As well as people
applying from their own homes, we know that
they are also accessing the site from libraries.”
STEVE SCOTT
In January 2006, we cut our job advertisements
in the local paper down to a quarter or half
page (from the previous one or two page weekly
spreads, with no detrimental impact on the
volume of applications being received. By reduc-
ing our spending on job advertising (from ?1.7m
to ?700,000 per year) and making efficiencies
in the Job Shop service, we have saved a total of
?1,340,000 so far.”
SHILPA ARYA

Integration with HR and payroll
In March 2007, the next phase of the
e-recruitment system at Leicester went live.
This involved the integration of Recruit with the Council’s new Northgate Resource Link HR and
payroll system. Until this integration, online
applications were received by Recruit and
then passed to the Job Shop where they were
transferred manually into the new HR system.
We receive over 1000 applications each month,
so this was a very time-consuming process.”
STEVE SCOTT
The two way interface between Resource Link
and Recruit means that there is now a seamless
flow of data from initial conception of vacancy
through to managing the successful employees.
Vacancy details are set up in Resource Link and
then sent to Recruit to post them on the web site
and enable applicants to apply online. As people
apply for jobs in Recruit, their details are passed
back to Resource Link where short listing and
other processing can take place.
By avoiding the need to double input vacant post
and applicant data, the new interface means that
management information reports, available in
Resource Link, contain accurate up to date data.

Looking ahead
The Council is currently in the final stage of
introducing a ‘shared services’ approach to all
its recruitment. A centralised recruitment service,
with Recruit as a key part, will replace the current
departmental structure, resulting in further
efficiencies.
The jobs site will also be enhanced to offer
registered users more functionality and to make
it easier to access for new users.
The functionality within Recruit will enable us to
offer more self-service for our managers, with the
ultimate goal of making it possible for managers
to advertise their own jobs online.
There is a great deal more in the new version of
Recruit that we are planning to use at Leicester,
and I believe that we can make many more
savings and continue to improve our efficiency.”
STEVE SCOTT
 
E-RECRUITMENT TO TRANSFORM PUBLIC SECTOR RECRUITME
SAYS SCOTTISH NATURAL HERITAGE
AT WCN BREAKFAST SEMINAR

Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), the Scottish non-departmental
public body set up in 1992 as the Government’s agency for natural
heritage in Scotland, announced at a breakfast seminar held on 1
December in Central London, hosted by IT and e-recruitment
specialist firm WCN Plc, that e-recruitment would transform public
sector recruitment.
Shona Kent, senior HR business partner and Julia Falconer, HR
project manager spoke of the need for change to make public
sector recruitment more value for money. Public sector
organisations could transform themselves by looking at how other
industries were benefiting in their recruitment to meet public sector
efficiency targets. They spoke of SNH’s paper-based recruitment
process which was overly lengthy. As a result, they might miss out
on attracting some of the best candidates in the field.
“We are up against fierce competition from all industry sectors for
high calibre candidates, so SNH needed to review their recruitment
approach to see how they could maximise their efficiency and at
the same time attract the best candidates,” said Shona. “The
public sector constantly has to re-evaluate how it spends tax
payers’ money and needs to look at reducing its costs,” she added.
SNH’s objectives were clear from the start: they needed to
modernise their recruitment to meet public sector efficiency targets
and get access to the best candidates.
In the process of modernising their recruitment, SNH needed to
review their total recruitment strategy to see how e-recruitment
would fit with the recruitment needs of the entire organisation.
The new recruitment initiative had to work within the context of
the overall recruitment strategy, the organisation’s policies and
processes, Government imperatives, its legal obligations and its IT
strategy. The new e-recruitment strategy also needed to adhere to
the relevant Civil Service codes.
Modernising recruitment in SNH would require the rest of the
organisation to accept the anticipated changes. SNH expressed the
need to get buy-in from other members of the organisation such as
the SNH leadership team, line managers, HR team and employee
groups. They talked about needing to consult Trade Unions in the
initial stages of the project to get early approval. “You have to
ensure relevant parties are involved early in the project so that
they understand what is going on and so that they provide
invaluable feedback,” said Shona.
As part of their drive to modernise recruitment, SNH spoke of the
necessity to understand what organisations outside the public
sector were doing in their recruitment to find the right solutions.
SNH are using WCN as their e-recruitment provider. “We chose
WCN for the functionality of the system and because they are very
service oriented.” Added Shona. WCN provide a 24 hour user
support service.
 
andie2385 said:
E-recruitment in
Web 2.O boost

Online recruitment is moving into the Web 2.0
world, with a new service from Chinwag Jobs
that uses online personalisation technology and
behavioural targeting techniques.
Chinwag claims that the service will offer
users a targeted iist of recommended vacancies
based on previous jobs they have viewed. It says
the service, provided by PositiveFeedback, will
give job seekers fuller and faster access to vacan-
cies that are relevant to them.
The service aims to improve navigation
around its website using real-time behavioural
targeting, as opposed to keyword or tag-based
searches, Tbis means that Chinwag can infer
what jobs people are looking for and present
them with vacancies based on the jobs other can-
didates like them are looking at.
Chinwag is the first recruitment site to use
personalisation techniques, which bave been
pioneered by large online retailers such as Ama-
zon with their "people who bought x also bought
y" service.
Sam Michel, Chinwag's managing director,
says: "PositiveFeedback's online personalisa-
I ion service makes it easier for our users to fin
turther opportunities, expanding their options
by recommending alternative vacancies that are
specific to their requirements."
Online recruitment is a burgeoning sector.
According to the 2006 National Online Recruit-
ment Audience Survey (Noras), the online
recruitment industry in the UK is now worth
more than ?200m, almost double its value in 2005
According to Noras, some 79% of respon-
dents had applied for work electronically, with
43% e-mailing their CV to an employer and 28%
completing an online application, Just 6% of
respondents put a hard-copy CV in the post.
Tim Elkington. managing director of
Enhance Media, which manages Noras, says:
"This is a great idea. As job-boards become more
competitive, any service that eliminates the need
to search thousands of vacancies can only bene-
fit users and job sites. Jobseekers don't want to
search swathes of vacancies, they want to see rel-
evant vacancies. This product is excellent news."
Elkington says that any functionality which
makes the user experience easier and more effec-
tive is a welcome development and can only be
a fillip for online recruitment. "Tbe standard
price of online recruitment ad space is relatively
small, therefore any tools that add sophistica-
tion could enable job sites to increase the amotmt
they charge and so buHd value."
Paul Cook, founder of PositiveFeedback,
adds: "We process behavioural data to fmd sim-
ilar jobs in real-time. This enables Chinwag to
provide imniediate and relevant recommenda-
tions to their users. Personalisation systems
have, until now, been traditionally used by large
e-commerce organisations. Our new pay-per-rec-
ommendation model opens up the technology to
a wide range of industries."
Elkington concludes that Chinwag's new
service is "the first of many Web 2,0 developments
we will see in the online recruitment industry".
Click to expand...

Hey andie, thanks for sharing such a nice article. Well, E-recruitment, also referred to as online recruitment, is the process of using technological innovation and in particular Web-based sources for tasks engaged with finding right candidate for a job. For more details, you can download my presentation.
 

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