-WARP
Hemen
Parek
Although
internet itself is more than two decades old. World Wide Web (www) is a recent
phenomenon, especially in India. Americans were the first to realize the
importance of internet as a powerful media of communication and advertising. It
was not merely “product – advertising” but it encompassed advertising for
“services” and for creating a “corporate image”.
The
Corporate sector which was one of the earliest to jump onto the internet
bandwagon was the “services” sectors, whether it was travel & tourism,
airlines, hotels, financial services etc. Not to be left-out were the
head-hunters!
To-day,
there are over 5000 websites offering on-line placement services. The big
daddies amongst these are :
All
of the above are American websites. As far as the job hunt / head hunt related
Indian Websites are concerned, there are
100 of them ! Amongst these, some of the most popular are:
Although
most of these websites have come-up during the last 2 years, the services
offered by these vary widely. All of these sites offer the following basic
services:
For
The Job-Seekers
Most
websites provide two basic services to jobseekers. These are:
Annexure
XII(Contd)
(A)
Posting the resume
However,
the questions that a prospective jobseeker might want to ask here are:
-
Can I submit my resume online or do I need
to sent it to the site by snail-mail and thereafter they will (at some
unspecified future date) upload it on their website? Will the website assure me
total anonymity, by hiding my name and contact information (address/phone no.
etc) or can this be seen/ viewed by any headhunters? Will my name get replaced
by a unique Code No. which is ailoted to me online the moment I submit my resume?
Can my boss findout that it is my resume?
-
Will the website reveal my identity to a
prospective employer (headhunter) without my permission?
-
The moment I submit my resume online, does
it form part of a “searchable database”? Can I myself decide / specify the
parameters under which I would like myself to be searched ? – parameters such
as Industry / Function / Designation / Educational Qualification / Posting City
preference / Age / Experience / Salary etc. At a future date, if I want to
delet / modify my search-parameters, can I do this online on my own ? To do
this, will I be ailoted a secrets password / user ID ?
-
In case, my resume gets short-listed by a
headhunter, will I receive an intimation from the website?
-
If I want my resume to be forewarded against
a specific job-advt posted on the website, will the website undertake to do
this?
-
If I do not wish to log onto the website
every evening to find out if some new interesting jobs have been uploaded, does
the website have a feature whereby I submit my “job-search criteria” only once
and whereafter the website will, on its own, keep track of all matching jobs
being uploaded / posted and keep me informed ?
(B)
Searchable Database of Job-Advts
Most
website boast of a job-advts. Generally these are “posted” by Corporates. Some
websites also scan the job-advt which appear in print-media and upload on their
sites.
But
in most cases, this a simple listing thru which a job-seeker must carefully-and
patiently – plod through, till he comes across an advt that interest him. This
process is no different than going thru job-advt / appointments section of a
newspaper, and may take hours if one has to even cursorily glance at 500
job-advts which may be listed on the website ! Not a satisfactory solution from
the jobseeker’s view point although with each jobseekers clicking 500 times, it
certainly helps a website to claim that it gets “thousands of hits” everyday !
Once
again the question that a jobseeker might want to ask is,
“is
the job-advt. database searchable within seconds – by simply entering my “
job-search criteria” such as Industry / Function / Designation level / Posted
City Preference etc. and clicking only once?”
For
The Headhunters
Most
websites provide two basic services to the HR/ Personnel Managers, These are :
(A)
Job-Advt Posting
Although
all websites allow Personnel Chiefs to post their job-advts on their site,
almost all (except one or two) charge a fee. Of course, the fees are very
competitive as compared to the cost of print-media.
However,
questions that a Personnel Manager ought to ask are :
-
Can I post my job-advt on-line on my own,
directly and without any intervention from the website or do I have to fax them
a copy which they will upload after a few days ?
-
If I am allowed to post it online, will it
appear instantly and can it be seen by jobseekers around the World from the
moment I click on “submit” button?
-
Do I get any feedback from the site, as to
how many potential candidates have “viewed” my advt / Is there a counter
against my advt that will tell me this?
-
Will I get the candidate – response
directly, without any intervention of the website?
-
Will the response mention ”Advt. No.”, so
that it gets automatically segregated/
(B)
Executive-Searching From Resume Database
(Head Hunting)
Most
websites have an online resume database – however, in most cases, this database
is not truely “searchable”- within seconds – by using search-parameters
(filters) such as Industry / Designation / Function / Edu. Qualification / Age
(yrs) / Experience (yrs) / Current city location etc.
In
the absence of a well-defined filtering process, where you can apply the chosen
filters simultaneously or sequentially (one by one), searching for your “Man
Friday” from amongst 30,000 or 50,000 resumes, resembles the proverbial Need in
the Haystack situation ! You might as well be reading typed resumes received
thru snail-mail-unless you like to get hypnotized with the sound of 10,000
mouse-clicks !
If
the website does offer some kind of a “filtering” process, the next thing a
Personnel Manager might want to know is,
Annexure
XII (Contd)
“Can
I, create on-line, a shopping basket, fill it with the resumes of the
short-listed candidates and instantly (of course electronically ) foreward to
the website concerned, to take further action?”
Apart
from the foregoing main services offered by most websites, there are a few
websites which offer one or more of the following features:
-
Compensation Surveys
-
Labour Laws
-
Career – Counseling / Interview tips
-
Industry Profiles
-
Salary Comparison
-
Statutory Returns be filed
-
Corporate Profiles
-
Educational Institutions Database etc
Most
of these features are of interest not only to the job-seekers and the Personnel
Managers, but also to a wide variety of executives. They would like to return
to their favourite site again and again. However, before placing a book-mark on
a particular site, based on various features described earlier, a Personnel
manager should also the following questions:
-
Is the site-content relevant to my
profession ?
-
Does the content help me with the qualify
of my decisions ? Does it help improve
My
personal performance and productivity ?
-
How interactive is the site ?
-
What is the traffic on the site ?
-
How do leading search-engines rank the site
on keyword such as jobs hunt and headhunt ?
At
this point, a Personnel Manager is quite likely to throw-up his hands and say,
“ Hey!
Hold
it ! Hold it for a second ! What is in it for me ? How does it help me ?” That
would be a natural reaction ! If I were to say,
“Cut
your average recruitment-cycle time from 6 months to 2 months by getting
web-sawy”,
How
would that sound ? Too good to be true ?
The
non-believers may wish to take a close look at Fig. 1 (Recruitment during the
dark-ages of pre-intemet era). If I have left-out any activity from this
process-flow-chart, feel free to add. Then estimate “average” time it would
take to completer each activity. (You already know that all the activities are
“sequential- there are no”parallel” process-hence every activity lies on the
“Critical Path” of PERT diagram). Add-up
the activitity-times.
Annexure XII (Concld)
Now
turn to
Fig
# 2 (Post yourjob-advt. on a website)
Fig
# 3 (Conduct an online head hunt on a website)
And
repeat the entire process of estimating “average activity time” for both these
charts and add-up.
If
you were to repear this process for the “actual time taken” to fill the next 50
vacancies in your Organisation and then plot a frequency-distribution diagram,
it will most likely look like the top curve on Fig.4 (Frequency Distribution
Diagrams for pre-intemet and post-inernet recruitment processes).
Then
compare it with the middle and the bottom curves.
When
you do, you know what is in it for you. If these three curves cannot convince
you to switch-over to the far more attractive
Web-Activated
Recruitment Process (WARP),
Nothing
else will.
No comments:
Post a Comment