Online recruiting best practice

May 2 2001 - An iLogos Best Practices report defines recruiting industry standards for career Web site features.

One of the main recommendations is incorporating a link from the corporate home page directly to the careers section on the company's Web site. 73% of Fortune 500 companies do this. Another Best Practices feature, utilized by 55% of Fortune 500 companies, is to make information available to candidates about a company's culture and work environment.

"This personalized assessment for companies helps them to measure their current performance against the standard for online recruiting and presents them with an opportunity to make a marked improvement in interacting with job seekers on the careers sections of their Web sites," said Yves Lermusiaux, president, iLogos Research. "It is critical that all companies make the most effective use of their corporate career Web sites, to brand their companies with potential candidates, who may also be customers and shareholders. Benchmarking practices against those of the Fortune 500 provides a useful measurement and perhaps motivation to implement best online recruiting practices."

Canadian companies have a lower rate of adoption and usage of online recruiting best practices compared to their Fortune 500 counterparts. This can be explained by lower overall penetration of corporate career Web sites among Canadian companies (64% versus 89%). Take away the Canadian companies without career sites and wefind that the remaining Canadian companies lead the Fortune 500 in over half of the best practices and by greater margins - and are well ahead in some of the most innovative best practices.

The top 100 Canadian companies lead the Fortune 500 in their use of some leading best practices on career Web sites, including:

- urgent jobs highlighted (4% versus 3%);
- submission of formatted resumes (13% versus 9%);
- e-mail to a friend (10% versus 9%);
- anonymous applications (3% versus 1%);
- online job agents (8% versus 6%);
- customized pre-assessment tools (5% versus 1%).

But the top Canadian companies fared less well in a number of other respects:

* Just 64% of the top Canadian companies had career sections on their corporate Web sites - compared with 89% of Fortune 500 companies.

* 45% of the top Canadian companies posted job positions on their Web sites - compared to 76% of the Fortune 500.

* Only 42% of Canadian surveyed studied post job positions and accepted online applications - compared to 71% of the Fortune 500.

Key areas where Canadian companies are behind their Fortune 500 counterparts include:

- ability for jobseekers to search a database of available jobs (17% versus 42%)
- link from the corporate home page to the career Web site (47% versus 73%)
- one click to apply for a job (36% versus 56%)
- information about company benefits (21% versus 55%)
- information about company culture (37% versus 44%)
- separate college recruiting section (21% versus 42%)
- automatic connection of an application to a job posting (24% versus 39%)
- candidate profiling (16% versus 19%)
- reuse of candidate information for multiple applications (9% versus 18%)
- ability for candidates to cut and paste their resume or use a resume builder (9% versus 14%).

"The identification of the best practices is the result of more than three years of iLogos Research monitoring the online recruiting activities of Fortune 500 companies. These results have become the benchmark against which corporate online recruiting practices are measured," said Yves Lermusiaux, president and founder of iLogos Research. "By failing to adopt key practices, Canadian companies will continue to fall behind Fortune 500 companies in the race for qualified talent."

Canadian companies were selected and ranked for this report on the basis of revenue. The online recruiting practices of these top Canadian companies were compared with corporate career web sites of the Fortune 500.

"The corporate career Web site is an important, yet underutilized tool for Canadian companies," said Louis Têtu, CEO of Recruitsoft. "More than 14 million Canadians have access to the Internet at home and we have seen a significant rise in the number of people conducting job searches online, yet only 64 percent of the top 100 Canadian companies have a career section built into their corporate Web site, compared to 89 percent of Fortune 500 companies. In fact, six percent of the top 100 Canadian companies still do not have a corporate Web site. In order for Canadian corporations to effectively compete for top talent globally, they will need to be more innovative in their online recruiting practices."

Bibliography and Amazon.ca

What Color is Your Parachute?: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career Changers
by Richard Nelson Bolles

The Interview Rehearsal Book: 7 Steps to Job-Winning Interviews Using Acting Skills You Never Knew You Had
by Deb Gottesman, Buzz Mauro

Power Interviews: Job-Winning Tactics from Fortune 500 Recruiters
by Neil Yeager, Lee Hough

175 High-Impact Cover Letters
by Richard H. Beatty