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Internet recruiting is, of course, a two-edged sword. If it's much easier for you to hire experienced workers, it is also much easier for competitors to hire away your own people. Employees can forget the advice that they need to market themselves, to develop their own "brands" in order to advance their careers. If they are good at what they do, recruiters will find them.
Many employers are out there ready to snap up your workers, and everything moves quickly in the on-line world.
As if that weren't enough of a problem, the proliferation of on-line information about pay and benefits is making retention even more difficult, since compensation is a key reason that employees leave their jobs. Using resources like the salary surveys by Robert Half International posted on Monster.com, people can quickly compare their own salaries against those offered elsewhere. On-line job services give workers unprecedented access to free information, and that information has shifted some of the power to employees in the employee-employer relationship.
Company loyalty can also suffer because of the sheer number of choices available through the Internet. Psychologist Charles O'Reilly at Stanford University and his colleagues have demonstrated that having more job choices decreases employees' commitment to their current jobs. With so many organizations recruiting on-line, employees can receive numerous job offers.
But companies can reverse the destabilizing effects of on-line recruitment. First, managers must be more careful than ever to avoid situations that might make employees think about leaving. With the Internet only a click away, there's no longer any time for an irate employee to cool off. A worker can post a résumé on a job board in minutes and be contacted by potential employers within a day. And once an employee starts looking, it's often too late to patch things up.
At the same time, companies should help employees make sense of on-line salary information, especially its limitations. Such data typically ignore stock options, for instance, and can't help an employee measure which jobs have the best advancement prospects. Sometimes employees are wooed away to new jobs because they don't see how good their existing situations are. A strong employee communications program that emphasizes the economic and social advantages to working at the company is essential.
Should you prevent your employees from being contacted by on-line recruiters? Some employers try. Cigna has changed the email addresses of its IT employees to make it harder for recruiters to get to them. Other companies use software to make sure there are no links from employee home pages to a company intranet through a firewall. Still others set up software that alerts human resources if employees receive email from on-line recruiters. Hewett Associates is one of many employers that check to see whether employees have résumés posted on job boards. Once you've determined which employees have been contacted or are actively looking, you can make efforts to retain them.
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| Many employees find it easier to land a job with a different company than get a new job at the old one. | |
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| — Peter Cappelli |
But a more promising approach, especially for large companies with many openings is to preempt on-line hiring by building an internal on-line job network. Most companies, even if they make quick offers to outside candidates, still find it difficult to move internal candidates around or make timely counteroffers. As a result, many employees find it's easier to land a job with a different company than get a new job at the old one. To make matters worse, on-line recruiting, which makes it cheap and easy to hire experienced employees, encourages outside hiring at the expense of internal development and placement. An internal on-line system may be the best way to satisfy employees' desires for new challenges.
Nortel Networks, for example, has contracted with Monster.com to create its own job board, Job Shop. "I want to make it drop-dead easy to find your next opportunity internally," says Brian Reilly, director of internal mobility. The goal is to provide an internal version of what's available in the outside market, thereby redistributing talent within Nortel's growing business and preventing employees from leaving for competitors. Any employee can post a résumé on Job Shop without alerting his superior, and any manager can post a job opening. The system automatically alerts managers' superiors after openings are posted.
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Four Steps to Making the Hire
On-line technology and the most current hiring-management-
systems software are crucial to companies competing for the best candidates in a high-speed job market. But the human touch is still indispensable.
Use your company's reputation, product image, on-line technology, relational marketing, and other methods to draw as many potential applicants as possible to your company's Web Site. There, you can reinforce your human resources brand and provide information about jobs and working conditions.
Sorting ApplicationsEmploy sophisticated standardized on-line tests to screen candidates, winnowing the applicant pool to a manageable number.
Making Contact QuicklyWork aggressively and use automated hiring management systems to contact the most desirable candidates very fast, before they're snapped up by another company.
Closing the DealMake the phone call, set up the meeting, shake the hand. The human touch, increasingly neglected, remains critical here.
Excerpted with permission from "Making the Most of On-Line Recruiting," Harvard Business Review, March 2001, Vol. 79, No. 3.