No more principals turning up when you need a math teacher: How one charter school found that online recruiting is easy, efficient and finds them the right candidates.When the principal of one of the Noble Street Charter Schools was looking for a math teacher a few years ago, he stumbled across something that made him laugh—the resume of Oliver Sicat, the principal of another school in the system.
That type of inefficiency pointed out very clearly why the consortium of seven Chicago-based high schools needed to change its slow, inefficient method of hiring to something more responsive that could pinpoint good candidates quickly.
"We had been using a rudimentary Web site, faxes and newspaper ads to recruit staff," said Sicat, principal of UIC College Prep, one of the seven charter schools. "It was manageable at one site, but once we started to grow—especially when we went from three to five campuses—we realized it just wasn't working well enough."
Like other organizations turning to online recruitment, Noble Street Charter Schools chose a Web-oriented, subscription-based model. It's in good company: The market for online recruitment, currently at $522 million, will grow at a rate of 8 percent, reaching $710 million by 2011, according to a December 2007 report from Forrester Research.
In this case, UIC College Prep settled on Taleo Business Edition from Taleo, a maker of on-demand, Web-based talent management tools.
The basic version of Taleo's online recruitment system includes a Web site branded to the look and feel of the company. The information captured about potential employees is fully customizable, said Jason Blessing, vice president of Taleo's SMB group. Applicant tracking allows companies to screen applicants, circulate applicant information internally, create reports and communicate with candidates.
The premium level also includes access to Taleo's API, allowing for more functionality. One example of the potential extra functionality the API can bring a business is "Smart Sourcing," which includes a set of analytics that allows the system to analyze a company's job posting and inform the company which job boards, both paid and free, will yield the best candidates.
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Ease of use and efficiency, as well as finding candidates who are a good fit, are drivers for all companies to use online recruiting instead of traditional methods, said Zach Thomas, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
"Historically you would have an e-mail box full of candidates. You would have a job open but probably wouldn't even think of going to that e-mail box. Instead, you would probably search Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com and call a headhunter," Thomas said. "Now the first place you would go is the existing database of people who have already applied to your company to see if you have someone that maybe you wanted to hire but didn't have a position open. It's much more efficient."
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For Noble Street Charter Schools, one of the biggest benefits has been identifying and scheduling compelling candidates quickly.
"We wanted a system where five minutes after someone applied, we would be able to respond and get them scheduled for an interview if they were a good candidate," Sicat said.
That's possible with the Taleo system, which sends school officials an e-mail update as soon as an applicant applies. Once that happens, officials can consult the online system, view the resume and application, call them immediately, and proceed with the interview and hiring process.
And because all of the information resides in a comprehensive Web-based database, everyone in the organization has access to the same information and can see at which step in the hiring process a particular candidate is at any given time, Sicat said.
In addition to Taleo, online recruitment vendors geared to handle smaller clients include Kenexa and Kronos. Although there are many vendors in the online recruitment space, it takes a special brand of online recruitment to win over businesses with just a few hundred employees, Thomas said.
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Smaller companies often don't have well-defined business processes for recruiting and need low-cost solutions with fast implementation and no hassle, Thomas said. Only online recruiting systems that offer things such as preconfigured industry best practices, easy configuration tools and attractive pricing models will succeed with smaller companies, he said.
An additional bonus of on-demand Web-based recruitment technology is that it keeps smaller companies more competitive and attractive to younger employees, Blessing said.
"Technology over the past several years has allowed companies to move to a virtual work force so SMBs aren't just competing with local companies and a handful of Fortune 500 companies for employees. The battlefield for talent is much more global," he said.
And because younger workers are used to the online world and wouldn't think of searching for jobs any other way, companies have to follow suit.
"If you're showing up to the that battlefield with your fax and a big mailbox, you won't look attractive to a millenial or Gen Y'er with that approach," Blessing said.
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