Executive Grapevine, February 2005

Betty Thayer is Chief Executive of exec-appointments.com.

A wide range of organisations and consultancies use the internet for recruitment. Advantages include global reach, strengthening competitive position, responding to urgent requirements or attracting diverse candidates to remote locations.

“Vodafone has reached the point where we now hire over 90% of our staff, particularly in the UK, directly through our Career Opportunities website at vodafone.com,” says Tom Brown, Global Head of Resourcing. “In terms of what we have done, it has driven candidate acquisition costs down substantially and dramatically increased our brand equity.”

Connaught Partners, an executive search consultancy which serves blue-chip multi-nationals and is a preferred supplier to the Cabinet Office, now posts all its vacancies online as a matter of course.

Using the internet has become a valuable tool to widen the candidate pool and is being used alongside other, more established search and selection methods.

Managing director Allan O’Neill says: “We took the view that to move forward we needed take a wider and more diverse approach to generate quality candidates. We were also keen to develop an e-resourcing strategy. We made a commitment that, where possible, we would operate a number of search methodologies in parallel and we have extended this to include using the internet.

Back

“e-recruitment is not price-prohibitive, so you can build it into your ongoing strategy,” says O’Neill. “We will run an electronic campaign on virtually every assignment we manage. It is quick and flexible, the lead times are short and within a week we can have results.”

Traditional headhunters are also waking up to the power of the internet. "We recently had our first experience with internet advertising and we were very pleased with the response. We delivered our client two strong shortlist candidates who were subsequently both placed from an entirely manageable response of 85,” reports Vicky Maxwell Davies of Boyden UK.

When a company identifies a requirement for an Interim Manager the need is usually immediate. Henry Morris of Armadillo Executive Resourcing says that “we have been using the internet to find candidates since 1995. We can have an ad posted and candidates responding within hours. It is absolutely critical to our continued success.”

Not-for-profits have also been able to attract candidates from a wide range of backgrounds, age groups and geographical areas. Carol Campbell, bursar at the Hospice of St Mary of Furness, told us “In a rural, fairly isolated area like Cumbria it is extremely difficult to attract new skills as we are constantly trying to pull from the same pool of people. Advertising online enabled us to appoint two new trustees for the first time in eight years and they have brought a range of skills to the trustee board that we could only dream of.”

Whether through your own website or a jobsite, developing an internet-based approach will almost certainly provide immediate, as well as long-term, benefits.

Reprinted from Executive Grapevine, February 2005