Online Job Ads With a Human Touch

Recruiter Toolbox company founder Michael Boyle figures there are about 4,000 Internet sites accepting recruitment advertising and as many as 18,000 sites where employers can post job openings. Finding qualified candidates in that haystack is impractical at best and impossible for most organizations. The Recruiter Toolbox software can help users find employment candidates by placing the right ads on the right sites.

Both a Product and a Service

It's difficult to separate Recruiter Toolbox the online service from Recruiter Toolbox the company, because with the online application come extensive consulting and customization services to make it effective.

Organizations can use Recruiter Toolbox's PostEasy, Resume Warehouse and HostEasy functions to execute comprehensive online recruitment strategies that include creating job requisitions, selecting and posting jobs to multiple web sites and tracking candidates through the hiring process. The company also says it can enhance a user's web presence to identify the company as a desirable employer--"branding" for HR purposes, if you will.

Recruiter Toolbox--the company--begins each client engagement by conducting a needs analysis. The outcome is a recruiting plan including an online advertising strategy based on getting users the lowest-cost sources for online ads. Recruiter Toolbox the software works with a client's existing systems and procedures, filling any apparent gaps and mapping and transferring data where necessary to integrate with the user's legacy and online systems.

Boyle estimates that it can take half an hour to post a job manually to just one web site. Recruiter Toolbox can post to multiple sites simultaneously in six minutes or less, and can do so at the same cost as posting to one site, or even at less cost. The online recruiting plan anticipates the number of ads needed at each site and also identifies niche sites where users can post jobs, so you're not posting just on the large, heavily used sites but also on smaller, more tailored ones reaching specialized audiences.

Once the media plan has been developed, Recruiter Toolbox's creative team goes to work on copy and graphics. The team's goal is to create an "employer of choice" image in users' ads and in communications between the recruiter and job seekers--even job seekers who don't get the job. "If a client gets 15 qualified candidates and only hires one, it wants to be able to hang on to the other 14," Boyle notes. "If any of the others are hired later on, the savings to the company [in advertising and other costs] can be significant."

Recruiter Toolbox has a call center tasked with supporting users. A verification team does a quality control check prior to every job ad posting. A site management team monitors ads once they've been placed on the many web sites. That team evaluates responses and suggests changes in ad strategies as appropriate.

Applicant Tracking

Recruiter Toolbox presents a clutterfree screen that makes effective use of unobtrusive graphics. It's easy to navigate from one module to another simply by clicking on graphical file tabs arrayed at the top of each screen.

For example, from the requisitions manager module in ResumeWarehouse, a user can look at new applicants, access a "to do" list, search for candidates, modify skills criteria or run management reports. The requisitions manager screen also lists all open requisitions. When the user clicks to open a particular requisition, she or he can click on boxes at the bottom of the screen to display a list of candidates from the applications already received or to post the job. Access to PostEasy is gained from ResumeWarehouse because posting is linked to specific job requisitions.

One recent user says recruiters need this kind of help because the world of online job posting is growing so large so quickly. "It's easy to find the major hubs, but it's a full-time job to keep track of the niche sites where you can post for free or for a small fee," says Gina Gifford, a recruiter whose former employer uses Recruiter Toolbox.

"Posting took time," she says, "and so did administration, to keep track of how many ads I'd posted. With Recruiter Toolbox, we could click to select the sites we wanted and wait for the resumes to come in. Recruiter Toolbox would do all of the back-end work of buying and posting, and we'd get a single invoice as opposed to getting separate invoices from each site."

Package Eases Data Formatting

Gifford described Recruiter Toolbox as "much more than a posting service" and said she appreciated its candidate tracking functions, including automated correspondence to send form letters to potential candidates. Because the service is Internet-based, there is no need to buy or manage a database server, and users can access their recruiting data from any PC, anywhere.

Gifford also appreciated Recruiter Toolbox's ease of use, which she attributed in part to its customization. She also liked the fact that the service enables recruiters to react quickly when they locate qualified candidates. "These days, if you find a computer programmer with the required skills and you don't present an offer within three days of receiving a resume, someone else will," Gifford said.

Did the package help Gifford's former firm find better candidates than her firm had been able to find on its own? "The candidates were definitely closer to what we were looking for," she says. "There were far fewer 'fluff' resumes, so they were hitting the right sites."

After seeing a demonstration, Katherine Rhodes, employee relations manager at Haverty Furniture Company in Atlanta, notes that the package combines advertising sourcing and placement with applicant tracking and follow-up.

"The advantages [of using Recruiter Toolbox] are time-saving and the ability to justify recruitment costs to non-HR managers," Rhodes says. The time-saving comes from elimination of the need to re-type job information to accommodate the data formatting requirements of different sites. "Everybody wants the same information, but they all want it in their format," Rhodes says. "It can take hours just to post one job, and if you go to every site you want to post to, it could take an inordinate amount of time."

Staffers Keep Tabs on Postings

A user who wished to remain anonymous explained that PostEasy can't relate to all of the detail on every site it reaches the first time around; however, "a pair of human eyes" checks each site, and any necessary corrections are made quickly and coded so that subsequent postings will be compatible with the site's specifications. In its early days, for example, the package didn't include the job location in its posts-a shortcoming because some sites enable candidates to search for jobs within a specific radius. Job location is now included when Recruiter Toolbox posts a job.

While he is extremely satisfied with Recruiter Toolbox and its functionality, the user mused about what he would like to see in the future: a "reverse" online recruiting system that would take users' requirements, poll online job candidate databases and compile a list of potential candidates from those databases automatically.

Boyle reports that development of such a capability is currently under way. The firm plans availability in the third quarter of 2000.

Recruiter Toolbox appears to have taken an early lead in the market for Internet-based candidate management systems. Organizations anticipating 200 or more hires a year should check it out now. Smaller organizations should keep it on their radar screens.

John Day is a freelance writer based in Decatur, Ga. He contributes regularly to several technology trade publications.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group