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Online Overload: The Perfect Candidates Are Out There - If You Can Find Them
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Long-time recruiters might remember this scenario: “Before the Internet, you’d get a job description on the back of a napkin from the hiring manager at about five minutes to five p.m. on the day you had to give it to your ad agency to get it into Sunday’s paper,” Mark Mehler, co-founder of premier staffing strategy firm CareerXroads, says.
He then describes how the ad would result in unwieldy stacks of resumes--a great many of which would not be applicable to the posting.
Now, Mehler says, neither recruiters nor job seekers scramble for Sunday’s paper, allowing for greater freedom in conducting job search and recruiting activities.
That might liberate hiring managers from the tyranny of media deadlines, but the advent of Internet job posting and search has created new challenges. For example, seeking qualified candidates using online resources can seem a bit like panning for gold: With just one more dip in the virtual stream, you may find what you’re looking for.
A Gold Rush Mentality
In the early days of the Internet, there were a handful of job boards it took mere minutes to comb, mostly because job seekers were hesitant to post resumes.
But today, job seekers are emboldened by the increased acceptability of posting resumes online. Recruiters search familiar boards, all the while worrying they might miss out on qualified people--and that their next query may present the riches they seek.
With Opportunity Comes Danger
Grace Whiting, an HR consultant, comments on how the Internet creates positive forward motion in recruiting.
“Job seekers can review a posting at three a.m., and recruiters can glean information from company Web sites, online professional journals, personal Web pages, networking programs and database resources like Hoover’s and Zoom, and identify potential candidates who aren’t even currently looking to make a move,” Whiting notes.
But, Whiting adds, “Millions of us spend hours and hours mining job boards for candidates, using online recruiting as a kind of crutch,” she says. She says recruiters can lose themselves searching the Internet--at the expense of other responsibilities. According to TalentDrive research, recruiters spend 65 percent of their time scouring the Web for resumes.
Professionals using the Internet to find resumes must be diligent and take care not to lose sight of crucial relationship management tasks such as wooing potential candidates, or, in the case of HR, retaining the employees they already have, says Whiting.
Improving the Odds
If endlessly searching the Internet for qualified resumes is such an uncertain activity, why do recruiters spend so much time in what Mehler calls the “Wild West”?
Sometimes they hit. CareerXroads has conducted research where respondents attribute 12 percent of external hires to Internet boards such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com.
Mehler feels these numbers have leveled out for the time being. “The technology has to be created that gives the job seeker the bulls-eye and gives the recruiters what they need, too.” He also notes that tech-savvy consultants have tried to develop software designed to tap a wide array of Internet resources before and failed.
TalentDrive, however, recently unveiled several new service and technology products with which it intends to tame Internet recruiting resources.
Ninety-two percent of recruiters say they wish they had more time for assessing, interviewing and retaining top candidates. TalentDrive hopes it will help those recruiters accomplish just that. Each of its services has been created to help hiring managers and recruiters find more high-quality professionals in less time, using a combination of proprietary technology combined with expert hands-on review.
In essence, TalentDrive seeks to increase recruiters’ odds and deliver the best the Internet has to offer. It’s the first company with the capability to search more than 40,000 Web-based locations—including niche job boards, local community Web sites, social networking sites and university Web sites.
Here’s how it works: TalentDrive applies Metcalfe’s Law (which states that the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network) by expanding a company’s ability to search every Web-based location instead of a select few, creating a larger “network” of resumes that will significantly increase the number of quality resumes found.
Those resumes then go through the TalentDrive Filter, where they’re scored through a set of highly-defined algorithms. Then, a trained skill set specialist provides objective, eyes-on expertise to evaluate and uncover 10 quality resumes within 10 days.
Sean Bisceglia, entrepreneur and CEO of TalentDrive, says, “I was inspired to create a service like TalentDrive’s during my previous venture, CPRi, a marketing staffing firm I sold to Aquent in 2007.” Bisceglia witnessed the positives and negatives of online recruiting firsthand with CPRi: “I thought: What if there was a technology that could connect all of these Web-based locations in one easy solution?” That idea was the impetus for TalentDrive.
TalentDrive provides a comprehensive sourcing and screening solution that enables companies to better leverage the Internet to find talent within Sales, Manufacturing and Distribution, Information Technology, Finance/Accounting and Research and Development/Engineering.
Bisceglia says, “I see us as the [online travel agency] Orbitz of online resume sourcing. We provide the most qualified resumes from the largest pool of candidates—the World Wide Web.”
Stephanie Molnar writes for BeTuitive Publishing. For more information, go to http://www.betuitive.com.