Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+

Personnel Today

Register
Log in
Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+

Personnel Today

Sites have designs on winning talent

by Personnel Today 1 May 2001
by Personnel Today 1 May 2001

Good
design has been cited as the most important factor of a successful recruitment
site in extensive research carried out in the US by Boston-based Cambrian
Consulting, which sets out to identify best practice in e-recruiting, writes
Sue Weekes.
.

Winning the War
for Talent: e-Recruiting best practice
reports that around 20 per cent of
the 140 sites it surveyed were easy to use and predicted they would generate
more return visits and, in the long-term, a higher candidate to visitor ratio than
the less well-designed sites.

“We were very surprised at the
number of sites that simply made it difficult for eligible candidates to find
and navigate a site,” says Bernard J Cullen, a partner at Cambrian. Among those
corporates whose sites applauded in the report are Cisco and Hewlett-Packard,
which are using e-recruiting to drive the redesign of existing HR practices.

Cambrian, which specialises in
human resource management and organisation development, put together a sample
of 140 corporate sites, basing some of its selection on Fortune Magazine’s Top
50 Companies to Work For, America’s Most Admired Companies and its list of
fastest growing companies.

As well as examining best
practices, it also set out to gauge the reactions of candidates to recruiting
Web sites. It evaluated the sites from a candidate’s perspective and, if
possible, completed the entire application process.

“On the whole, we found few
breakthroughs or potential breakthroughs to major recruiting issues,” comments
Cullen. “This lack of progress underscores both the difficulties and untapped
potential of developing standard frameworks for HR processes.”

Overall, findings showed that
20 percent of the sites contribute significant value to their company’s
existing recruiting practices and while a further 60 percent added value, they
don’t form part of an integrated recruitment and hiring process. The remaining
20 percent, says the report, add “marginal value” to company recruitment.

Its assessment showed that
high-impact Web sites have eight key features: a design which emphasises
accessibility, logic, ease of navigation and visual appeal; background
information on the company and work environment; clear, concise and compelling
job descriptions; flexible and easy-to-use mechanisms for sending CVs; a job
basket to enable candidates to apply for more than one job at a time; search
facilities that enable users to carry out fast job searches; the ability to
apply online; and tools to help candidates prepare CVs.

The report also covers common
pitfalls, which include not making your career and job section as obvious as it
could be from the corporate home page and not giving a clickable link for
contacting an HR person or recruiter at the company ( many just have a phone
number or mailing address to reply to that particular vacancy). There was
evidence that sophisticated added features will improve the overall
effectiveness of a site. These include self-assessment tools which provide more
information on a candidate’s abilities, and skills search agents that allow
applicants to create personal profiles so they can be alerted by e-mail when
new and appropriate vacancies come in.

“Few US sites made any attempt
to do online screening of candidates,” adds Cullen, who says that the company
will be extending its research to UK, European and Asian sites in this year’s
research.

“We
recognised that there were some major differences in how companies – even US
companies – designed their UK and European Web sites. Most notably, UK and
European sites are at the forefront of doing online assessment of candidates
which US sites have to be very cautious about,” explains Cullen. “Also the
differences in sites reflect the amount of work that companies need to do to
develop integrated HR practices.

To
view the final report, click here.

You
need Adobe Acrobat to view the report. If you do not already have it you can
download it at www.adobe.com/acrobat

Future
research

Currently,
most companies see greater value in allowing individual businesses to maintain
their own HR practices. Our view is that in the long-run, integrated global
processes that can accommodate significant local variations will have to be
developed if major companies are going to be competitive and are going to offer
employees maximum career opportunities. HR processes are inherently no
different from accounting, logistics, sales, marketing and R&D.”

Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance

Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday

OptOut
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Cambria
Consulting will be conducting an expanded review of e-Recruiting sites in June
2001, expanding the study to include 50 company sites in Europe and Japan.  The study will also review a sample of
general and specialized job boards. The firm  is interested in hearing from anyone with
ideas for the next version of the research. Email [email protected]

www.cambriaconsulting.com

Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

previous post
Business roundup
next post
Spring clean your IT system

You may also like

Forward features list 2025 – submitting content to...

23 Nov 2024

Features list 2021 – submitting content to Personnel...

1 Sep 2020

Large firms have no plans to bring all...

26 Aug 2020

A typical work-from-home lunch: crisps

24 Aug 2020

Occupational health on the coronavirus frontline – ‘I...

21 Aug 2020

Occupational Health & Wellbeing research round-up: August 2020

7 Aug 2020

Acas: Redundancy related enquiries surge 160%

5 Aug 2020

Coronavirus: lockdown ‘phase two’ may bring added headaches...

17 Jul 2020

Unemployment to top 4 million as workers come...

15 Jul 2020

Over 1,000 UK redundancies expected at G4S Cash...

14 Jul 2020

  • 2025 Employee Communications Report PROMOTED | HR and leadership...Read more
  • The Majority of Employees Have Their Eyes on Their Next Move PROMOTED | A staggering 65%...Read more
  • Prioritising performance management: Strategies for success (webinar) WEBINAR | In today’s fast-paced...Read more
  • Self-Leadership: The Key to Successful Organisations PROMOTED | Eletive is helping businesses...Read more
  • Retaining Female Talent: Four Ways to Reduce Workplace Drop Out PROMOTED | International Women’s Day...Read more

Personnel Today Jobs
 

Search Jobs

PERSONNEL TODAY

About us
Contact us
Browse all HR topics
Email newsletters
Content feeds
Cookies policy
Privacy policy
Terms and conditions

JOBS

Personnel Today Jobs
Post a job
Why advertise with us?

EVENTS & PRODUCTS

The Personnel Today Awards
The RAD Awards
Employee Benefits
Forum for Expatriate Management
OHW+
Whatmedia

ADVERTISING & PR

Advertising opportunities
Features list 2025

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin


© 2011 - 2025 DVV Media International Ltd

Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+