“CHARLOTTE, N.C. October 25, 2000 – Nearly eight out of 10 companies are not adequately using their Web sites for staff recruitment and retention, says one of the nation?s leading information technology and professional staffing services companies.” This from a press release issued by the Personnel Group of America on October 25. The release goes on to point out what firms like Wetfeet.com and others have been consistently saying all year: we as recruiters aren?t understanding how critical customer (read: candidate or potential candidate) relationships are on the Web. Or if we do understand, we are not selling what we know well enough to our management. If so, corporate websites would have a much stronger appeal to candidates and would meet the minimum requirements that I outline below. Yesterday I attended a meeting where an investment banker was discussing the tools of e-commerce. She discussed three categories of e-commerce tools (Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management and Business Process Improvement) that have emerged over the past few years, and, as she talked, it struck me how these apply to recruiting. In this article I will focus on Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and cover the other two in later articles. I have made the case for months now that recruiting has to learn from the e-commerce world and remake itself in a parallel way. Some of you have read my 10 rules of e-recruiting, which are adaptations of the 10 rules of e-commerce, put forth by Business 2.0 magazine. And any of you who are closely involved with Internet recruiting will understand how there is a great need to re-look at everything we do in recruiting and reinvent it. Whether or not we like it, the Internet and our websites are becoming the primary place candidates go when they think about changing jobs. And, when someone sees an advertisement for your company, uses a product or wants to know what your sales are; they go to your corporate website. While they are there, they are potential candidates if you can attract them. So the first tool category of e-commerce is called Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is often referred to as the “front-end” of the sales or recruiting process. It consists of acquiring customers or candidates, communicating with them and building on-going relationships by using email and other communication technologies. In recruiting, customer acquisition consists of understanding what the candidates need and want, generating awareness of your company and the positions you have available, pre-selling candidates on your company, capturing data about the candidates as they use your website, analyzing that data and learning from it to improve the relationship, and distributing that information to the appropriate recruiters or hiring managers – perhaps even in a real time way. <*SPONSORMESSAGE*> How do you do this? Here are several ideas on how you can make your web approach much more customer focused and CRM-like:
The whole reason to have a website is not to duplicate the corporate recruiting brochure. It is to build relationships and develop an on-going communication process with anyone who might at anytime become a candidate for one of your open positions. You should think of the web site and the entire Internet as your database. You will always have to develop strategies to attract people to your website, but when they arrive you need to make sure you have this robust, powerful CRM-like tool or you will have wasted a lot of money.
