WILL THE INTERNET REPLACE RECRUITERS? 
by: DOUG BEABOUT, CPC

This next New Year’s day holds a great deal of hope while for some, great concern about the future of the recruiting business.  Many people are proclaiming that technology’s demise lies just after midnight New Year’s Eve.  Some recruiter’s believe that their client’s are running in droves to their PC’s because they have abandoned their belief in the value or advantages of the traditional recruiter. 

There always seems someone is yelling “the sky is falling!”  Adjectives such as cheaper, faster and easier are being applied by some client companies to the process of Internet based recruiting.  Recent articles and media proclamations extol the “incredible benefits” of candidate courting in Cyberspace.  Applicants are far more educated now about surfing the web than just a few years ago. The river of resumes flowing through the Internet is huge.  Many companies have their own web sites where they commonly post openings.  Professional societies and associations all have their own “dot-com” or “dot-org”.  I think our paper carrier even has his own website.  All this technology and information access is reported to be destined to destroy our personnel services industry.

This recruiter believes that the doomsayers and their predictions of our demise at the hands of the “Web” are dead wrong.  The Internet itself is not a malevolent force destined to bring about the end of the search industry.  It simply offers an added pathway to identifying people ready to explore a better opportunity.  The lies in exploiting the advantages offered by information technology while not falling prey to them.  Let’s examine what the Internet really represents and how we can thrive in it’s presence.

What advantages does the Internet offer to our client’s recruiting efforts?  It offers easy access to an advertising medium.  They can post openings and easily access emailed responses and resumes from interested parties.  It provides, via a company website, a techno-sexy means of putting their companies desired image in front of the public.  The cost of electronic advertising for applicants is considerably less than an advertisement in the printed media of their choice.  The company can modify or delete a Internet based job posting at the click of a mouse.  Web posting of openings and its perceived benefits are usually attractive to the human resources department.  This is particularly true when the Internet posting is compared to calling the local newspaper or the Wall Street Journal and hustling to beat the classified deadlines of the paper.

While our clients are extolling the revolutionary wonders of the Internet, professional recruiters need to give them a reality check on a few issues.  First, the same applicants who answered the ads a few years ago are now surfing the Web and answering even more job postings.  When we take into account the fact that we are experiencing the lowest unemployment rate in decades, it is not surprising that the respondents to cyber-ads are often among the walking wounded unemployed or worse, terminally unemployable.  Secondly, the companies of a few years ago had much larger departments.  These departments, when faced with an opening, simply went about the standard procedures of filling the job.  They had the luxury of taking their time to find a “fit”.  Today that department is seriously short-handed.  When an employee leaves it is a crisis management situation.  The instant gratification of posting a job opening on the company’s website may seem like a miracle cure but it often fails to locate the type of candidate our client’s require.  Thirdly, when a company seeks a highly skilled and multi-talented candidate with competitive knowledge, that person is not likely to coincidentally “surf” to their website (or yours!).  That critically required candidate is best found by a professional recruiter providing a skilled and value-added search process of recruiting proven to provide top talent. 

The employment agencies of the past commonly called companies on Monday morning regarding the classified ads they ran to attract applicants.  Then the agencies would race to the nearby newspapers with ads for the “job orders” they received from the companies.  They were given these “job orders” as a result of their promise of producing a better candidate by “recruiting” versus the results from client advertising.

It is true!  We can and should be selling our unique abilities to recruit the best-qualified candidates.  Our actions should never reinforce the negative stereotype of the agencies of the past.   We should be careful though to protect our reputation as professional recruiters.  We exclaim to our clients our unique ability to penetrate source companies and recruit people who are below the radar screen of their ads and beyond their limited sourcing skills. I submit that if we turn our website into electronic classified ad boards we can appear to be resorting to the very tactics we commonly condemn.  Client contacts are disturbed when paying a substantial fee to a recruiter and discovering later the candidates were not directly recruited but rather answered an electronic “Ad”.  This practice is so extensively abused and used as an easier path to candidates that many clients are demanding to review any such job postings, whether on our website, or any of the other major sites designed to attract applicants.   Discretely posting selected openings on a website can produce placements.  However, it is highly advisable that you keep your client aware of your actions rather than letting them learn of the posting by other means.

There are many advantages on the Net and by virtue of computerization.  First, we should share our searches and candidates with one another, both electronically and personally.  Technology has made the sharing process a truly profitable practice.  The two building blocks of what recruiters have to sell are time and information.  Technological advances in information management and our rapid access to current information have been a wonderful advantage to the recruiting business.  Through our own website, we can project a desired image of ourselves.  A few years ago, our efforts to build a reputation and image were limited to the people we could call. 

The Internet does offer many advantages to achieving excellence and competitive results in direct recruiting.  Company websites are tremendously helpful in both client development and recruiting.  Our website can offer us a great platform for attracting clients and developing an image of a preferred provider.  The resources on the Internet are nearly unlimited.  They can aid us in rapidly obtaining relocation data, cost of living, technological insights and many other areas of information.  The Internet is and should be a great repository of information to be shared by all.  It also offers a unique forum for developing our professional image and brand identity.  I strongly support its exploitation as a resource and advantage.  There is no replacement yet for the process of professional recruiting and executive search.  The most important positions in our client companies will continue to be filled by preferred providers of value-added recruiting services.  Sure, companies will fill positions by surfing the Net, but these are often the same positions filled in the past by conventional advertising means.

The Internet is not a threat to our business.  We will continue to be the choice for recruiting top talent and the results the best-qualified candidates can bring to our clients if we avoid the path of least resistance by “surfing versus sourcing.”