Leveraging Web 2.0 to Recruit

Historically, recruiting has not been a particularly transparent process. Organizations looking to hire put a job description out on a Web board such as Monster, CareerBuilder or Dice, and candidates apply on that limited information alone. The vast majority are rejected without ever knowing why.

“In effect, corporations are basically screening people out. Candidates don’t feel like they’re being recruited into organizations, or being made to feel wanted,” Zach Thomas, an analyst with Forrester Research, told eWEEK.

Though Web 1.0 recruiting technologies such as big job boards and vendor-powered ATS (application tracking systems) on corporate career sites have been effective in increasing efficiency and driving down recruiting costs, in the Web 2.0 world, candidates want more texture in the recruiting process—transparency, unedited content, answers to user-submitted questions and communication that is not only top-down.

“It makes the whole process a lot more transparent. It puts the community in control of the information out there, versus the traditional ‘here is the position and we will tell you what it is all about,’ where the candidate can’t ask questions or see for themselves,” Thomas said.

Organizations that limit their recruiting efforts to outdated processes will lose out in the long run, Thomas said, as a younger generation of job seekers wants more transparency in the recruiting process. Furthermore, the passive majority of candidates—those who may not even know they are looking until presented with the right offer—are increasingly “out there” in social networks but are not being approached.

The answer is for organizations to start taking advantage of social computing, something colleges have long done to meet students where they are, but that has yet to move into corporate culture.

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