Five steps to successful online recruitment

Success in online recruitment depends very little on the vagaries of the internet and very much on careful planning and a clear recruitment strategy. There are five steps that every recruiter should take when thinking about recruiting online.

Step 1: What job is it?

You’d be surprised how many recruiters start on the process of trying to hire someone without having a clear idea of what vacancy they are actually trying to fill. It is this lack of clarity which leads to many recruiters realising, right in the middle of an interview with a candidate, that there is a lot more to the job than they realised.

It can be a terrible waste of time for both you and the candidate, The easiest way to avoid this is to prepare properly. The first step in any recruitment process should be the preparation of a job specification.

A job specification is a written document which outlines the duties of the job, skills required, personal aptitudes etc. A good job specification will help you see exactly what you are looking for rather than what you think you are looking for. A job specification will thus help you avoid hiring the wrong person and also help you avoid hiring for the wrong job. Read our article, ‘First things first: write a Job Specification’, for help on writing a job specification. And use our handy downloadable ‘Job Specification Template’ to write your job specification.

Step 2: What person is running things?

Decide who is going to do what, where and when in the recruitment process. For example, you will need to have someone choose the job boards, someone to post the ad online, someone to distribute the job through social media channels, someone to make initial replies to applicants, someone to review the CVs, someone to set up interviews etc. Clearly, all this requires careful management and resourcing.

Individual tasks can be assigned to different people, but we would recommend that you assign overall responsibility for the entire recruitment process to one single person. If you have one person looking after everything then that person will be able to take proper and effective responsibility and make sure everything happens when and where it is supposed to.

Step 3: What job site to use?

Using the whatjobsite can help you find quality job boards quickly and easily. All the approved sites in our search results have been checked and meet our job board standards. So, you know you have quality sites. But if you use other ways to select job boards, such as a search engine, be sure to do proper checks on the sites you find. Being top of Google isn’t any guarantee of quality. Make sure you check that the job board is a quality site and that it is the right one to advertise your job. For more help on choosing the right job boards, read our article ‘How to choose a job site’.

Step 4: What do you say in your ad?

In talking to job boards we find that the one thing they all agree that recruiters most often get wrong is the ad copy. They complain that recruiters simply don’t put in the effort to write good job ads. For recruitment success you have to make sure that candidates not only find your job but also that they want to apply for it when they find it. To do that you have to write good ad copy. Spend time on the job ad. Cutting and pasting a job spec simply isn’t good enough. It’s a job ad not a job specification — and ads are about selling things.

Luckily, writing a good job ad isn’t rocket science and our article ‘Writing job ads for job sites’ will give you plenty of helpful tips. The important thing to remember is that you are writing a job advertisement: sell the job, sell the salary and benefits, sell the prospects, and sell your company. Make people want to apply for your job rather than a job in another company.

Step 5: What about the response to the ad?

First of all, be sure to respond to applicants quickly. There is nothing as frustrating for a candidate than being uncertain as to whether their application has been received or not. Let them know that it has been received and where they are in the recruitment process.

More generally, if you are getting applications from wonderful candidates then you can sit back and thank the good Lord for the magic of the interweb. If, on the other hand, response is poor either in terms of the quantity or the quality of candidates, then try to figure out what is wrong and fix it. It could be that the salary is too low or that the ad is posted in the wrong sector on the job board. It could be one of many things but find out what the problem is and fix it.

Talk to your job board client manager. They know about online recruitment and how to make the most of their site. And they want to help. Job seekers will come back to a job site the very next day, next week or next month to look for vacancies so you do, in a sense, you get a second chance. If you need that second chance, make sure you make the most of it.

So, what’s the upshot?

Online recruitment offers clear advantages over traditional recruitments methods. At the same time, however, one must remember that it is still recruitment. The fact that it is cheaper and quicker than other forms of recruitment does not change anything. No matter what size your company, make sure that you have the best possible recruitment process in place before you begin. If you do, you will have a much better chance of online recruitment success.

Next steps? Check out these other guides and articles:

• An introduction to Applicant Tracking Systems
• What is Job Posting Software?
• An Introduction to CV Databases
• Active and Passive Candidates
• An Introduction to Online Recruitment