Shedding light on technology for the future

We may be entering a period of economic uncertainty but there is little doubt that both the recruiter’s and candidate’s reliance on new media will continue to grow throughout 2009. So just how will technology and new media further impact the sector over the next 12 months and what tools, techniques and methods will help recruiters not only survive the recession but ensure they come out the other side as one of the winners? Sue Weekes asked those who spend their lives at the leading edge for their views

Julian Acquari, managing director, UK and Ireland, job board Monster

The business environment will undoubtedly become tougher and unemployment looks set to increase, with the latest figures showing it could reach as much as 3m. For online recruitment companies this means that they need to really listen to what employers want and deliver on this. One way to do this is to personalise their services and offer solutions that are more tailored to organisations as businesses are increasingly likely to scrutinise applicants to ensure they maximise their return on investment. Jobseekers will increasingly use online recruitment websites to search for temporary positions as permanent job availability declines. Without doubt, online job boards will enable users to search for employment opportunities quickly, efficiently and also increase their search nationwide and globally if necessary.

Marco Bertozzi, director, media and digital, recruitment advertising and communications consultancy TMP Worldwide

The reality is that people across all generations are spending large volumes of time online, so the argument about demographics is fading into the background. From an employer’s perspective, this provides a huge opportunity to use digital methods to communicate with candidates directly and in doing so reduce agency spend, lower attrition rates and build their brand in the marketplace. Key strands for all of us will continue to be the online job boards and job environments. I believe we’ll see search and paid-for listings, as well as mobile, becoming more important as a channel to allow contact with candidates, whether it be through texting and job alerts or mobile sites. In the past year we’ve used Google Gadget Ads, 2D barcodes in mobile and are currently working with a client on building psychometric testing into computer game play. But work must always be about taking a brief and deciding on the best approach for the client, not technology for technology’s sake.

Dan Cohen, head of sales, Broadbean, provider of online advertising and response tracking services

Technology seems to be aimed much more at the passive candidate, and using communities to reach these people will grow next year. Recruiters who refuse to use such methods will be forced to be more resourceful. We’ll see more aggregation of recruitment channels, with an emphasis on search, along with traditional contingency methods. Economic circumstances mean that UK recruiters will have to be innovative to compete with other nations for the best talent. And increased aggregation will allow recruiters to tap into a global talent bank, predominantly using online candidate attraction tools.

Gautam Godhwani, chief executive, jobs search engine Simply Hired

Despite a tough economy, the long-term effects of a global talent shortage are inescapable. As a result, companies will have to work harder to attract skilled talent. Candidates are spending their time online very differently than even five years ago with the emergence of search, social networks, blogging and video. This requires a new approach to recruitment, and the companies that leverage new media, coupled with good measurement and optimisation infrastructure, will see the greatest benefit. Over the next 12 months, the market will see a much greater use of new media for recruitment efforts, with companies extending their employment brand in new and unique ways online. Employers will create a deeper online presence, starting with their website, but extending to profiles on social networks, online groups, company blogs and video with tailored messaging to specific audiences. Job descriptions online will also become interactive and better reflect the employment brand of the company.

Paul Harrison, managing partner, Carve Consulting, an offline and online marketing consultancy

If 2008 has been the year of Web 2.0 and social media, then digital reputation will be the hot topic in 2009. Reputation is already a fundamental tenet to many online spaces — eBay, for example, just couldn’t exist without its reputation system. And as recruiters get to grips with social spaces and professional networks as environments to find candidates, having a trusted reputation and an authentic message will become increasingly important. Online communities — from Facebook groups to alumni networks to technical user forums — tend to have an incredibly strong sense of the sanctity of shared interest, and a recruiter who appears from nowhere, suggesting that he is working on a number of exciting roles with such and such a company, is certainly going to create more harm than good. The recruiters who survive and thrive will be those who have built and nurture their individual reputations within these communities of talent.

Stephen Jones, director, Focus Management, a recruitment consultancy dedicated to the food and drink sector

The next 12 months will undoubtedly give us significant candidate traffic as the numbers of unemployed rise. It is key that we do not get complacent with this reactive candidate resource, as we must continue to drive our IT activity for proactive candidate attraction targeting progressive individuals still in work. We must develop and execute a wide selection of engagement techniques to communicate business news and information, as well as job postings to our audience. Our blogging activity, websites and use of new contact technology such as Twitter will advance and become more sophisticated, as will our involvement with social and professional networking sites. We all need to be lean in our approach but not so emaciated that we cannot cope with sudden business improvement when it comes. From previous experience, I can see many businesses missing the opportunity to take marketshare by focusing purely on the challenges of coping with recession. Continual investment and innovation in IT, while not the panacea, will certainly help us be ready and best placed to once again gear up the recruitment market.

Luke Mckend, industry head, careers and classifieds, Google

The surfeit of candidates and contraction of available jobs will encourage recruiters to experiment with more accountable media such as search marketing. Recruiters will also have to work more closely with their marketing colleagues and leverage the work they are doing to build the consumer and corporate brand. Employers are increasingly providing potential candidates with ‘authentic’ views of what it’s like to work for them. There has been an explosion of video content on YouTube — the PricewaterhouseCooper ‘Amarillo’ spoof, for example. What’s really interesting is that this type of content is being created by employees — often without official sanction from HR or recruitment advertising agencies. Corporate user-generated content has the potential to be cost-effective in engaging tech-savvy candidates. By allowing candidates to provide feedback, employers are able to open a dialogue with top talent which is more likely to engage them than an application form.

Ben Nunn, head of client services-digital at recruitment and employee communications business, ThirtyThree

From a direct recruitment perspective, I think we’re already seeing employers thinking more carefully and creatively about how and where they attract their candidates. Measurement technology plays a big part in assisting with this — with employers beginning to see the importance of tracking, measuring and then responding to the facts that are presented, allowing recruiters to properly optimise their online budgets. Social media will also play an ever-increasing part in attraction strategies — this has been proven to work well as a recruitment advertising platform, but just like any other media, its use and the expectations of any results are determined by the audience being targeted. Above all, if the trend follows that employers look to move to a more direct recruitment model, then alongside any media campaign, the destination site (careers pages, microsites, job boards) will play an even more vital role in promoting and defining the employer brand. Providing a rich, well-thought out and engaging resource for employers to converse with the candidate, and using interactive elements to bring key content to life, will all go a long way to create a truly appealing experience and present a real insight into what makes that employer right for them.

Tim Richards, managing director, recruitment and talent management software specialist Bond UK

Over the course of next year, assuming the economic impact does worsen, business inefficiencies will no longer be tolerated, and so an ability to monitor real-time trends in business activity will become more vital. There will undoubtedly be an increasing demand for the ability to directly compare key performance indicators for recruitment activity with progress so far, ideally in a graphical dashboard format so that concerning trends can be identified sooner rather than later. Also, although mobile working has been discussed almost ad nauseum over the past year, the next 12 months will see HR managers and recruiters demanding the ability to access not just email and central documents from their mobile devices, but also their recruitment systems and applications — be that from a laptop, Blackberry or iPhone.

Alan Whitford, managing partner, e-recruitment strategy consultancy, Abtech Partnership and co-founder, Recruitment Community Europe

The challenges for recruiters will be how they can turn the technology and information available to them into sound business tools. At our recent conference, we had bloggers streaming content to our website, people were feeding comments through and interacting from home or work via instant messaging and we had a live presentation from Texas — and all of this was happening in seconds. Technology will never replicate face-to-face experiences, but just think how this communication capability could be used to engage with the candidate. There is so much ahead of us but in areas such as e-recruitment I find myself having the same conversations about building talent pools and applicant tracking systems that I had 10 years ago. Some organisations just don’t seem to get that it is all about the conversation with the candidate. Once you’ve got your candidates’ details on a database, how difficult can staying in touch with them be for goodness sake? Drop them an email to ask how they’re doing, send them a birthday card or even send them some news about your company. Some organisations have cracked it, while others have great graduate programmes that never get out to their wider recruitment strategy.

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