Recruitment

How Online Recruiting Changes the Hiring Game

Online recruiting is changing the way employers think about finding good employees and the way employees think about their jobs and their employers. Indeed, the Internet may completely change the way companies manage human resources, says Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School.

For example, says Cappelli, some 18 million resumes are posted just on Monster.com, the largest Internet job site. Monster.com boasts it has almost 500,000 jobs available. With more than 5,000 job boards where resumes and job opportunities are posted, the Internet has become, by far, the most effective way to broadly disseminate information about the availability of jobs and people.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Recruiters who wish to do so can access millions more resumes and biographical data that are posted on the Internet but are not intended for job searches. Take Ed Melia, a consultant with Monster.com. With virtually no effort, says Cappelli, Melia can find the resumes of employees at any company. With another command, Melia can narrow the search to just those with specific skills – 567 individuals at IBM, for example, who have C++ or Java programming skills. These are not people who are looking to change jobs. Their resumes are posted on various web sites for a variety of other reasons. Recruiters can also, as Cappelli describes it, “flip the URL”; that is, follow links back through the web sites and get into a company’s intranet to get lists of employees. The recruiters aren’t hacking into the sites. These sites are legally accessible, but were never intended for outsiders to see.

The yield of such searches is a rich trove of skilled employees who would be excellent recruits – if they were looking for jobs. They are called “passive applicants” in the business – people who aren’t looking for jobs, but might be induced to do so if approached. The Internet has thus become an extremely valuable resource...