An article Online and overwhelmed by Bill Leonard

An article Online and overwhelmed by Bill Leonard basically describes about how hiring activity on the Internet has dramatically increased since past several years. Over the past decade, the Internet has become the single most powerful tool in recruitment advertising. Because of the growth and popularity of online recruitment, thousands of job boards are now emerging, giving employers more options than ever before to target and hire quality candidates. Today every business whether that is a big company with millions of employees or a small scale business with some hundred employees, recruit their best candidate online for their positions ranging from receptionist to CEO. Given article also highlights how internet provides excellent weapons to help employers fight for talented and qualified job in the worsening labor shortage market in the United States.

                        Article presents some useful data about how rapidly online recruiting is becoming popular in the marketplace. According to the data presented in the article, in 1998, 70 percent of the 550 HR professional used the internet for recruiting in Los Angeles. But it was just 21 percent in 1996. And it is also infer from the article that this data could go up in the days to come. More than 30,000 thousand commercial websites are now competing one another to gain this piece of market and around 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies are posting jobs on their own sites.

Article emphasized that not all the sites or job boards’ are good from employer stands point. Therefore, the article suggest that employer should assess the sites themselves and not be taken in by fake claims of the site. Article further emphasized that to solve this problem employer can consult with the recruiter and employees. In the article many recruiters prefer using Monster.com, CareerMosaic.com, Hotjobs.com and CarrerPath.com. If the recruiter narrowed down the choices through research, then article suggest them to pretend to be a job-seeker to find out the how many similar jobs are already posted to find out the degree of competition.

Because posting ads on an internet is much more cost effective than placing ads in the newspapers, another important benefit of recruiting online is its cost effectiveness. And surprisingly, this popular tool of hiring is equally important for all large and small firms. Therefore, if HR professionals of any small or large firms who haven’t used the internet to recruit employees are in fact hampering themselves and missing out the biggest weapons to survive in the competitive edge.

One of the problems associated with the online hiring is that they tend to connect recruiters only with people who are actively seeking jobs and it ignores the entire passive candidates. To solve the problem of passive candidates, article provides some ways like “recruitment sourcing”, and ‘hiring source specialists” who work with corporate recruiters to find potential candidates. Not only , but also the organization can hire a sourcing strategist or turn to consulting firms to pull the entire list of active and passive candidates.