e-Recruitment 2.0: The changing face of online recruitment

Dropping 2.0 on to the end of words seems to be in vogue at the moment, so I thought I’d better jump on the bandwagon and start my commentary on “e-Recruitment 2.0”  - the future of online recruiting.

So what’s in store for e-recruitment in the Web 2.0 era?

Digital community opinions
Call it what you like - social media marketing, word of web, connected e-marketing. Basically what we’re talking about here is the power of word of mouth. Many of us are now more likely to jump online, interact and listen to the views of an online community than pop down the local to seek advice from the resident know-it-all.

The Web has given us access to more individuals with experiences we want to hear about than ever before.

Blogs, podcasts, vodcasts are all being recognised as an e-recruitment tool as well as a corporate communications channel. By their nature, blogs open up a two-way communication between a company and a prospective employee. 

We often hear about skills shortages in the Digital Marketing sector. Is power slowly falling into the hands of job seekers who can now easily learn more about prospective employers and their company culture before they pick and choose who they want to take their talent to?

The power of Search Engines…
With the vast majority of job seekers now using search engines to find relevant job postings, many recruitment agencies and HR departments are turning to search marketing to improve candidate flow.

The flexibility and performance-based payment nature of pay-per-click search engine advertising is becoming a real alternative to print advertising. With print classified advertising experiencing a decline, many of the large scale publishers are even turning to their online job boards to help plug the gap in lost revenues.

RSS  distribution
RSS (define) is increasingly being adopted as an effective distribution tool for job listings. Hotjobs was one of the first major job boards to embrace RSS feeds.

Google also offers an RSS feed for its Google Base job search results, so even if you don’t have one of your own site you can upload your jobs on to Google Base. This has made it even easier for recruiters to increase both candidate reach and flow at relatively low cost.

Pay for quality over quantity
As job board search technology develops and the use of artificial intelligence in screening and matching candidates to jobs improves, we will start to see employers list their jobs for free on the job boards. 

Job boards will make their money by storing 'candidate details' (CVs, profiles etc) as a result of having these jobs and make their money from giving the recruiter access to high quality candidate CVs. The focus will be on quality over quantity to help reduce the cost of candidate screening and selection.

The long tail of e-recruitment
As the job board market becomes even more saturated we’ll start to see more differentiation and a greater focus on serving a particular niche.  We will start to see more savvy job seekers using search engines to hunt for specialist job boards that offer greater quality job listings than those on generic sites like Monster.

We’ll see more specialist sites popping up and communicating with candidates looking for a specific vacancy type and within a specific industry sector.

And within those niches we will see the more nimble players in the market innovate to attract lucrative candidates and advertisers. Recently HotCareerPages.com launched a series of tools that enables jobseekers to place their CV online as a webpage with a unique URL.

The candidate can also optimise their web CV for search engines as well as receive job offerings direct to their personal inbox from recruiters through their webpage.

Is the future bright, is the future 2.0?
Without doubt the way people recruit and hunt for jobs is changing rapidly. Job seekers have greater access to more jobs, and, recruiters have greater access to more candidates.

But does all this change mean that employers will more easily find more of the right candidates to fill job posts and that job seekers will more easily find the right jobs to help them lead a fulfilling career? Who knows…thoughts on an e-card please!