Brother, can you spare an hour on compuserve?: how the internet will reinvent corporate recruiting.

Wyld, David C. ; Cappel, Sam D. ; McLaurin, James Reagan 等

INTRODUCTION

Today, there is literally a massive rush of traffic rushing onto the Information Superhighway. Millions are logging onto the Internet for the first time, fueling the massive growth of the number of Internet users and sites on the World Wide Web.

With all the hype about the Internet and the Web, the question is what can you actually do in cyberspace? Each and everyday, imaginative individuals and innovative companies--large and small--are establishing their presence on the Net through establishing addresses and posting their own homepages on the World Wide Web. Whether it be conducting research (Makulowich, 1995), advertising products or services (O'Connell, 1995), trading securities (O'Connell, 1996), making travel reservations (McCartney, 1996), or even gambling (Zgodzinski, 1995), all these diverse uses of the Internet share one common thread. They are all based on the Internet's inherent advantages over other, established modes of communications.

The Internet has proven unmatched as a communication device--allowing for electronic mail (e-mail) messages and entire documents to be transmitted between parties with the click of a mouse and for real-time conversations--both in print and increasingly will full audio and video--to be conducted over the Web. This capability allows individuals and organizations to communicate more easily, more quickly, and more cheaply than ever before, whether the parties involved are around the corner, across the country, or literally around the world.

The exponential growth of the Internet has been phenomenal, and there seems to be no end in sight to both corporate and individual interest in not just entering cyberspace, but finding ways to make profitable use of its communication abilities. The Internet is thus fast moving into the mainstream of American life, and with this move, it is becoming regarded as a key tool in business communications (Flynn, 1996). Yet, for all the hype and for all the innovative uses of this network of networks, as Greengard (1995) noted, the true value of the Internet will be seen as the medium is employed to solve real problems.

While being able to read David Letterman's Top Ten List, to buy office equipment or flowers, or to even play blackjack for real dollars from anywhere on the planet at any time may be inventive and perhaps even practical, they are not revolutionary uses of the newfound communications power of cyberspace. This is due to the fact that each represents the use of the Internet as an alternate form of communication or outlet of distribution for information and products that have formerly been sought in a marketplace that works rather well in the "real world."

Today however, nothing short of a revolution is occurring on the Information Superhighway in one aspect of the business marketplace that has never worked very efficiently--that of matching up prospective employees with employers with job openings that match their skills, education, and abilities (Levenson, 1995). The use of the Internet for corporate recruiting and for job hunting has been categorized as developing "at breakneck speed" (Booker, 1994, p. 1). Although hard numbers are difficult to come by, hundreds of individuals everyday are already finding employment through the new employment market in cyberspace (Grusky, 1996). While today, between fifty and eighty percent of the jobs listed on-line are technical in nature (Fryer, 1995), the Internet is fast-emerging as a placement arena for everything from sales to secretarial positions (Grusky, 1996).

Rarely can it be said that you lived through a quantum change in the way things are done. However, with the advent of the Internet, just such a change is taking place. It is occurring in the way companies are recruiting individuals for positions in their firms and the manner in which job hunters are contacting companies to express their interest in positions within them. No one expects the Internet to replace the local florist as the primary vendor of flowers or for "cyber-casinos" to replace Las Vegas or your local Indian casino. However, the Internet may well be transforming forever the way corporations recruit employees and the way individuals hunt for jobs. In this article, we will explore the roots of this change and the likely implications for human resource management into the 21st Century.

THE INTERNET'S ABILITY TO MATCH JOBS AND JOB HUNTERS

How do companies fill job openings? Traditionally, there have only been a limited number of options. These include the use of classified advertising, the engagement of executive recruiters, and the listing of the position with government agencies. On the other side of the equation, how have individuals gone about seeking employment? Once again, job seekers have only had a limited number of options available to them--namely sending out resumes and completing applications for organizations after finding out about an actual or expected job opening. The principal challenge on both ends of the equation is for each party to learn of the other's need in a timely fashion.

The Internet has the potential for making the job market work much more efficiently than it has in the past for both organizations and job seekers. This is because of its potential to provide timely information and to facilitate new and different types of communications between and amongst both job seekers.

There are a number of ways that organizations--both large and small--can take advantage of the Internet in their recruitment efforts. Some companies however enter the realm of cyberspace for recruiting not through a deliberate strategic effort, but rather through small steps, or even accidents. Newspapers themselves, along with a variety of consortiums and on-line services, are posting classified advertising on the World Wide Web (Siwolop, 1995). This has led to electronic job-hunting as job-seekers scan these ads via the Internet. Also, companies are fast making it standard practice to include their Internet address in not only their mainline advertising, but in their classified ads as well. Thus, there are beginning to be significant numbers of job-seekers who are choosing to respond to companies' job postings via e-mail, rather than through the regular mail. Simply by giving applicants the ability to e-mail their resume to the company or a corporate homepage address to access more information on the company and its job openings increases the response rates to advertising jobs in classified ads or other media. Hodes (1995) noted that this is a benefit that is often overlooked, due to the fact that the use of the Internet in such a fashion simply adds value to companies' traditional media-based recruitment efforts. Finally, some organizations find that they are making use of cyberspace as a recruitment medium as a result of "renegade" human resource personnel and tech staffers who post job listings on the Internet without authorization (Appleton, 1995).

Increasingly organizations are making a deliberate effort to move more and more of their recruitment efforts onto the Internet through posting their job openings either on links to their corporate homepages on the Web or through commercial on-line services (such as CompuServe and America Online) (Allen, 1995). Through either method, potential applicants are allowed to examine a company's job openings and then make a determination as to whether or not they wish to apply for a particular position. Application can then be made through either the submission of an electronic version of the applicant's resume or the completion of an electronic application for the company.

In fact, an organization's entire application procedure can be transformed into a programmed process, guiding the applicant from the on-line job posting forward to the consideration stage. Submitting an application can be done with the click of a mouse. When an application has missing information, the company can instantly ask an applicant to supply it--or refuse to accept it. A company can also ask for the e-mail addresses of an applicant's references, and then instantly send out pre-programmed requests for information on the applicant from them. Likewise, once an applicant has been determined to have met the baseline criteria for a particular position, the programmed process can automatically run the necessary security, criminal, and/or credit checks on the applicant.

What are the advantages of posting jobs on-line versus more traditional means of communication? With the advent of the Internet, companies can literally post job openings in minutes and begin receiving resumes and applications for these jobs in hours (Greengard, 1995). This is a vast improvement over classified ads, where a company must await not just the publication of newspaper editions where the ad for a given position will run, but also the built-in lag time of the applicant mailing in a resume in response (Appleton, 1995). Another inherent disadvantage to classified advertising is the fact that in the print media, information is a variable cost. Posting a larger ad makes the process more costly. Likewise, running a classified ad repeatedly costs more than a one-time posting. However, with on-line job postings, there are no additional costs per word or per inch. As such, a company can feel free to give as much detail as warranted for every job. In the same vein, companies must pay varying rates for classified advertising based upon the target audience they wish to reach (based upon the newspaper's circulation figures). In contrast, on the Internet, there are negligible, variable costs to post an individual job, and the audience is, potentially, unlimited. This turns what was formerly a variable cost in human resource management (in deciding how advertise each particular job opening) into a much reduced (and fixed) cost (Appleton, 1995).

The major advantage of posting jobs on the Internet over traditional forms of communication has proven to be the nature of the respondents to the job listings. Overman (1995) observed that it is quite common for employers to get far fewer responses to on-line job postings than classified advertising. However, the quality of these responses, in terms of the suitability of the applicants for the positions in question, has generally been found to be higher due to the high education levels of today's Internet users.

Perhaps the principal reason for the higher quality of Internet-based applicants springs from the fact that the Internet serves as a great method of "self-selection." This is due to that fact that with Internet-based recruiting only being in its infancy, candidates who are the most technologically savvy and the most computer literate will be the first-ones to make use of the Internet for job hunting (Flynn, 1996). According to James Gonyea, author of The On-line Job Search Companion, "the very fact that a candidate seeks jobs this way (on-line) demonstrates a willingness to use technology and to be in touch with the cutting edge" (quoted in Fryer, 1995, p. 60). Thus, the Internet has been touted as the best way for high-tech companies to link-up with those who have technical and computer skills (Levenson, 1995).

The Internet has also been extolled as an excellent means for companies to reach out to top-tier college students due to the fact that the best and the (technologically) brightest are the students most likely to make use of the Internet in their job hunting efforts (Hodes, 1995). Still, experience is showing that despite the fact that self-selection is happening, college students are largely not being sought by employers over the Internet due to the desire of companies to find skilled and experienced personnel (Levenson, 1995).

For all the structure which can be imposed on the application process, the Internet also promises to make the recruiting process a less structured, more free-wheeling affair. This will ultimately mean that the company can have more and better information on applicants than what they have had in the past. However, the information may come through very different communication processes and devices than what are employed today.

If the Internet is fully developed as a corporate recruiting tool, the very concepts which are considered fundamental to the recruiting process--the "resume," the "application," the "interview," and the "site visit" may be changed forever.

Resumes will more and more become "files" that are ready to e-mail to companies rather than documents that are to be mailed. As Radding (1995) stressed, this means that the form of resumes must change as well. This will be due to the fact that corporations are moving to programs which can quickly scan volummes of resumes e-mailed to a company--hunting for key words emphasizing the experience, knowledge, and abilities an organization would be looking for specific positions. More and more, a resume will not be a self-contained document, either in electronic form or on paper. Within five years, as "personal" homepages become increasingly commonplace, they will become an indispensable tool in job hunting. Welz (1995) observed that "soon, to be taken seriously in the high-tech job market, you will be expected to present yourself in hypertext on the Web, complete with links to your publications, reference letters, and, if you have a sense of humor, pictures of your dog" (p. 52).

Interviews have heretofore been thought of as having a "quorum"--that being at least a company person (or persons) being in a room with an applicant. However, with the advent of the Internet, the very concept of interviewing may be in for a significant change as well. No longer will there be a requirement for anyone to be any particular place for an interview to occur. Interviews can occur via on-line conversations and e-mail. Also, with the inclusion of video transmission capabilities, fully interactive conversations can take place. In fact, the very nature of communications on the Internet allows for much more contact to occur between company personnel and one or more applicants. Through discussion groups , chat-rooms, and e-mail, those employed by a company and those seeking employment with the same organization can carry on dialogues spanning hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. While Loeb (1995) labelled this practice with the negative moniker of "cyberschmoozing," Overman (1995) commented that electronic communications can make establishing such relationships--whether or not they might end up in employment--much easier.

Thus, while the interview has formerly been considered a discrete, time-limited event, the Internet makes it conceivable for employees and potential applicants to carry-on a more freewheeling dialogue which may--or may not--even center around the potential employment relationship. This can serve to greatly enhance the quality of the communications between the parties and to transform the interview into a true process.

Visiting an employer's place of business and the locale where one might be working can also be made much easier over the Internet. Today, we live in an environment where anyone with an Internet connection can take a full-color, full-motion tour of the White House, the Louve, or the San Diego Zoo. Companies can put this same technology to use to allow outsiders--not just applicants and potential job hunters, but clients, customers, students, etc.--to tour their plants and facilities, to hear words from their key executives, and to see their entire line of product offerings. In short, such an action could become not just a tremendous recruiting tool, but a positive public/customer relations asset which could serve both to enhance the corporate image and ultimately, to sell products (Overman, 1995). Further, companies can add video and still clips which will allow applicants and other interested parties to learn about the communities in which they could possibly live while working for that particular company. Hypertext links can actually allow applicants to check out home prices in these areas, school systems, and even churches--permitting job seekers to check out the lifestyle and cultural aspects of various locales (Booker, 1994). To add such a feature, companies can either put together such "community information" themselves, or more likely, work in conjunction with local chambers of commerce, tourism agencies, civic governments and community groups and realtors to make use of their resources in their respective areas.

Making use of the Internet enables both companies and individuals to expand their geographic reach. In essence, geography becomes a "non-issue" in at least the early stages of discussions regarding job openings between organizations and job applicants. With contacts made over the Internet, electronic communication makes distance or even national boundaries irrelevant, as it costs no more and takes no longer to transmit e-mail or make contact with a homepage which is around the block, across the country, or around the world. Already, there is evidence of transnational job placements having occurred over the Internet (Clancy-Kelly, 1995). There can be no doubt that the ease of communications via the Internet enables companies to cast a wider net in recruiting applicants, and vice versa, for job seekers to inquire about positions with companies farther from home and farther afield than ever before. As Levenson (1995) stated, the Internet "breaks down the geographic limitations of traditional job searches...(allowing) job seekers to achieve a visibility they could never get by mailing resumes to individual employers (p. 7). Yet, in this environment where time and space are made less relevant to recruiting and job hunting, there is perhaps even a greater need than ever to have personal contact between the employer and the job applicant (King, 1995). Thus, while today it is just as easy for a person to apply for a job with a computer electronics firm in Hong Kong as an outfit in Austin or for a company to consider an applicant from Bombay as one from Baltimore, when it comes to serious consideration, that may be another question entirely--as the true costs and implications will always come into play for both the prospective employer and the applicant.

Thus, the use of the Internet by human resource management for recruiting presents a number of potential advantages to organizations. Holistically, it has been noted that the Internet offers the possibility that human resource departments can be made more productive--in that they can fill more jobs in less time at less expense (Welz, 1995). Quite simply, on-line recruiting will also be less paper-based and will thus require less clerical workers to handle the paper and less filing cabinets and storage space (Greengard, 1995). While this may well mean that new computer resources may need to be acquired to handle resumes and correspondence coming in "bits" rather than on paper, overall, it has been projected that the changeover may make the operations of human resource departments in organizations much less costly (Appleton, 1995).

What are some of the potential pitfalls for Internet-based corporate recruiting? First, Flynn (1996) cautioned employers to make sure that their own employees have the same access to job postings in cyberspace as external job seekers have. She urged employers to list jobs and make the application process for openings available both on the Internet and over their internal intranet. If a company failed to do so, it might actually serve to give external job applicants "a leg up" on internal candidates, which could serve to greatly hurt employee loyalty and morale.

The second potential disadvantage for the increasing use of the Internet for corporate recruiting is the impact which this could have on diversity in organizations. The overall statistics on the growth of the Internet contain a concerning detail. This is the fact that the millions of people in the subset of the American population who are Internet users are not as diverse a group as the entirety of America. While the demographics are beginning to change to be more reflective of society as a whole, the fact remains that the Internet is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white (Bournellis, 1995). In fact, it has been speculated that employers who would solely rely on the Internet for recruiting might well be conducting a practice in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (Hatlevig, 1995).

Employers should thus be aware of the potential discrimination law ramifications of Internet-based recruiting. However, the main preventative measure that a company can take to avoid potential charges of racial or gender discrimination is to use both Internet-based and more traditional methods of recruiting potential job applicants.

Yet, for today's concerns over both the current demographics of the Internet and the current law regarding employment discrimination, the true potential of the Internet lies in its ability to promote greater diversity and greater fairness in the employee selection process. As the demographics of the Internet come to reflect America as a whole over the next few years, the Internet has the potential to remove stereotype-based barriers to employment faced by many groups in society. Over the Internet, one's race, one's gender, even one's physical disabilities, play no role whatsoever in the decision-making process of potential employers. If ever there was a totally-objective environment in which to make employment decisions, cyberspace is it. Thus, as more and more companies shift to the Internet for employee recruiting, more and more individuals will have truly equal opportunities at employment. It has been suggested that the Internet will be the ultimate way for women and minorities to circumvent the "good old boys network" and level the playing field (Fryer, 1995, p. 60). Some have even suggested that the Internet is the ultimate way for extremely talented, but extremely introverted individuals to succeed in job hunting (Holden, 1995).

On a final note in this regard, what will the advent of an Internet-based employment market mean in regards to the use of executive recruiters as a source of personnel? What will become of so-called "headhunters" (who are in the business of matching skilled personnel with companies having need for such people) when companies and individuals can link-up without an intermediary? In the near term, even though making use of an executive search firm can cost a company tens of thousands of dollars per job (Appleton, 1995), it appears that executive-level jobs may be some of the last to make the transition to cyberspace. These are still largely being filled via traditional networks and executive recruitment (Siwolop, 1996).

THE FUTURE OF CORPORATE RECRUITING IN CYBERSPACE

No matter how much the world has changed over the past few decades (and in truth since the rise of the industrial age), the employment market has operated pretty much the same. In the employment marketplace, companies have went to look for qualified applicants that suit their needs, while likewise, applicants have went looking for jobs that meet their expectations. Over the past centuries, managers have went from advertising their jobs in the village square to advertising them in the Sunday classifieds. Over the past decades, applicants have went from typing their resumes on typewriters to I.B.M. Selectrics and then to computers. Yet, no matter what technological innovation has come down the pipe (telephone, overnight letters, fax, etc.), the constant in the employment market has been that employers and prospective employees have carried on their mutual searching process in physical space.

At the cusp of the 21st Century however, the employment market--along with the entire global economy--is beginning to make the move into cyberspace. In Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte (1995) wrote eloquently on the rise of the information-based economy. In the former economy, which was based on making, moving, or servicing things, the basic building block of the economy of the past was the atom. Think about it. Even in the employment market, in order to exchange information, managers and applicants had to--if not physically meet--at least exchange physical forms of information (resumes, applications, reference lists, etc.).

According to Negroponte (1995), bits of information are the most basic element in the emerging information economy. In this new era then, information--and value--for the first time can be exchanged totally electronically. The rise of the digital economy will change commerce as we know it greatly over the ensuing decades. It will also greatly change the operation (and location) of the employment marketplace. The explosive growth of the Internet in the mid-1990s will lead the move toward the digital economy (Gates, 1995). It will also propel a move toward a digital employment marketplace.

Will the Internet truly reinvent corporate recruiting? Only time will provide the answer to this question. However, what cannot be disputed is the fact that the employment market is undergoing its most radical transformation in history. Companies and job seekers would be well advised to stay abreast of developments in this area and investigate closely how they can take advantage of a changing employment marketplace.

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David C. Wyld, Southeastern Louisiana University

Sam D. Cappel, Southeastern Louisiana University

James Reagan McLaurin, Western Carolina University

Jack Tucci, Southeastern Louisiana University