We need to use the technology for recruitment

I was having a chat with a colleague who like me is looking for work and we were talking about the job hunt, about requirements and agencies etc, I wrote an article about it, here about that.

Anyway, I was wondering if organizations, whether it’s the public sector, the non-profits or even the enterprise could benefit from a slightly different way of doing things in terms of recruitment.

At the moment there are about four ways to search for jobs within an organization:

• Recruitment agencies themselves by phone, email or web
• Recruitment sites – online
• Organizations themselves – online
• Linkedin -online

I wondered if we couldn’t turn this around a bit?

Use RSS feeds/blogging to articulate the jobs available, their requirements, and a more wholistic description of the role?  There will of course be the job title, a description, but with a blog/rss feed, we can also articulate the requirement, illustrate what kind of individual we want and through it, gain more understanding of the people applying, of the market, where we might need to focus our HR and investment on talent, even how we need to adjust the job specification to reduce application by those lacking the right skills.

For example, with a RSS feed combined with a twitter feed, we can:

• See the number of subscribers – how many internal and external people are reading interested in vacancies – what trends can we see with the data?
• We can monitor where people are geographically and by sector/experience – our IT people aren’t visiting enough how can we fix that etc
• We can survey them, find out what they seek in terms of payment etc, match our requirements with the markets  – can we use this to illlustrate the package, the salary, the core benefits to working here?
• We can gain more exposure to the people looking for work, maybe increase as  a percentage the number of direct hires?
• Maybe even bring an end to those ultra long documents you need to download to fill in, to apply for a role – particularly in the public sector, which requires you to re-write your cv again to the role, and answer a series of questions. Why is all that not online?
• Appeal more to younger audiences like graduates who are in tune with these technologies
• Articulate what kind of people we are after, what core skills they need – how you can brand yourself to be in line with our business

I’m sure there are issues with data protection, with process, but think of the opportunitites in terms of exposure, dialog and community? Just like LinkedIn. For example as a person that’s worked for say BBC, if I were a member of the BBC ex employees group in LinkedIn, wouldn’t it be great if I could subscribe to the BBC job feed? I have the experience, the site knowledge, it might not take that much to tempt me back to that organization?

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