Courtenay HR

Final Frontiers

Four years ago, when the internet boom seemed unstoppable, industry pundits were falling over themselves to predict the end of traditional recruitment consultancies. Large companies would advertise job vacancies on their own web sites, they said, and job boards would have the rest of the market sewn up. But this didn’t happen. Employers were slow on the uptake: rather than looking to the internet for candidates, they continued to rely on established methods. And the recruitment firms were also slow to recognise what the web and its related technologies could do for them.

But things are changing at last. Over the past few years internet technology has started to play a crucial role in recruitment consultancy. To understand the way things are going, you need only look at how high-street retailers, such as Vision Express, Harrods and New Look, are using the web.

Vision Express, for example, manages its entire recruitment process online - from the initial application through to interviews, and even the decision to select or reject a candidate. The magic behind this comes from i-GRasp, a technology company based in St Albans. Its software automates and web-enables the entire procedure. CVs submitted via the internet are analysed by intelligent software, which also allows candidates to track the progress of their applications online. From this, the employer receives reports advising on the best method for hiring, when to hire and the cost per hire.

So what does such powerful technology mean for recruitment consultancies? “What has changed is the speed and the ability to access the basic resource,” says Simon Pettit, director of Hudson’s commercial division. It means that a relatively labour-intensive process has become much faster. The result is that the time it takes to hire someone has been reduced dramatically.

“It lets us go through CVs and vet them for clients at a much quicker pace than if we were having to wait for replies to traditional ads,” says Debbie Pask, consultant at Astralis. John Baker, head of practice at MDH, agrees. “It has massively affected the way we work,” he says, but, as he points out, speed is not the only thing that has changed. The internet has also reduced costs. “You can advertise roles at far lower cost than when using print media. This means you can offer clients a ‘stepped’ approach by first looking at the response that you get from an online advertisement before then considering print,” Baker says.

The potential cost savings for employers are huge. But, rather than being jettisoned in favour of the technology, recruitment consultancies are being asked to work alongside it. “More and more of our clients are saying that they want us to participate in their online candidate management processes,” says Gareth Jones, managing director at Courtenay. But this can present its own problems for recruiters because the industry is extremely fragmented and has lots of small players. “When a client wants to get smarter, the implication is that they need me to integrate my technology with theirs,” he says.

Jones believes that recruitment consultancies’ candidate management processes are generally very different from those of their clients, and that this gap will need to be closed. This will entail a considerable investment. In terms of choosing the right software, it is an investment that consultancies must get right. Having said that, most recruiters agree that the technology can only go so far, and that internet usage needs to be tailored to the types of candidates their clients are seeking. Sales jobs, such as those for which Vision Express is recruiting, are well suited to internet methods because web technology can handle large volumes of job applicants swiftly.

However some recruitment experts question the effectiveness of online recruitment for positions higher up the management chain. At executive search level, for example, candidates expect the personal touch. Senior managers or directors are unlikely to be hunting around on the internet for their next board-level position, so they have to be approached individually, according to Baker. “Using web technology is in essence a quantitative approach,” he says. “At some stage you still have to assess the person qualitatively against your culture, and that is what the technology can’t do.”

Debbie Pask disagrees. She points to Astralis’s recent success in recruiting a senior HR executive via the internet. “We were recruiting three £90,000-£120,000 roles for big telecoms companies, and about half of the applications that made our shortlist came from the internet. This indicates that senior HR directors take this sort of technology seriously,” she says. Pask talks of a consortium of developers in the US that is working on an HR version of Extensible Markup Language (XML). This is a web programming language that has been developed to allow different computer systems to exchange data seamlessly. The idea is that, by developing and publishing open data-exchange standards based on XML, the consortium will allow any company to transact with other businesses without having to establish, engineer and implement separate interchange mechanisms. In effect, this will enable organisations to share information across the internet in real time.

Closer to home, Carole Bodell, managing director of HRi, says that her firm now has video conferencing facilities and could combine these with 3G technology to give its clients another basis on which to make their recruitment decisions. But she does admit that, when it comes down to it, “nothing is as good as face to face”. So the answer for most recruitment consultancies is to tailor technology to their clients’ needs. Ultimately, they are still needed to help make a decision. The work they do behind the scenes and the way in which they present potential candidates is crucial. But there can be no doubt that web technology is at last playing a vital role in the recruitment process. Over the next five years it is likely to tighten its grip.