Can high-tech beat high-touch?

Job boards play role, but are the best candidates not looking for work?

                    by Bryant Ruiz Switzky

Technology has intruded into most aspects of life and business in recent years. Recruiting is no exception.

We asked four local leaders in the recruiting industry, on different ends of the technology spectrum, about how they do and don't use technology in their work.

Q: In what way has technology replaced human interaction in recruiting?

Carla Bainbridge: In the industry that we focus in, such as retail hospitality call centers, it used to be that -- and still is in a lot of cases, but it is changing -- that someone would fill out a paper application. The paper application would get circulated or brought to the hiring manager and from there they would start the process of interviewing. Today, in order to be competitive there is a need for streamlining that hiring process and quickly identifying, using some science, the best candidates for those positions. It is very competitive and the market has changed in that the candidates are less loyal, moving around more, more apt to use the Internet to find jobs ... If I was to talk to 10 retailers, there would probably be one currently using technology, but every last one of them is looking at how they can [use technology to streamline the hiring process], because they know they have to to compete.

Paul Beard: A lot of bigger companies, in particular, have hired internal recruiters, feeling that they can use the likes of online job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder to bring in candidates and reduce their spending with search firms. In certain cases with low-touch, high-volume searches, it can be beneficial. In other cases, when there is more of a higher-touch involvement, we've found it hasn't worked. Many clients that I personally work with will not put ads out on Monster, CareerBuilder or any online job board.

Q: Are job boards relevant?

Bainbridge: For our clients, in terms of the best referral sources for more candidates, employee referrals are No. 1, but No. 2 is job boards [like] CareerBuilder and Monster.

Al Brown: But not all candidates are on the job boards. ... Only 20 percent of our work force, on the industrial side, even has e-mail access at this point. ... In the industrial sector, the traditional newsprint, the flyers, the job fairs are where you attract the lower-entry-level skilled candidates. The mid-skill candidates -- the technicians, the two-year degree folks -- they're still not all online. It's the higher-level, more-senior folks -- the engineering or IT people -- they are on the job boards more. But you're not going to find the CEO and the presidents wanting their names out on the job boards.

Gary Nygaard: I think a big thing that companies may not understand is that the best candidates many times are not looking [for jobs], so a lot of people who are looking are certainly taking more advantage of the technology that is in front of them to present themselves to the market. But many of the best candidates are not looking and therefore they're not going to be checking ads, they're not going to be going through Monster. They're doing [their job] and they're very happy with what they're doing and probably plan on staying a long time, until they get a call from one of us with a different opportunity.

Bainbridge: On the flip side of that though, I think many of the best candidates are employed but passively looking. And how they would do that, because it's easy, is to get online -- just to check it out.

Q: What's a typical recruiter fee?

Beard: The average fee is probably 25 percent for contingent search. For retained search, most of the searches are one-third of the total. There are firms out there that are willing to work at reduced rates.

Q: How much money do companies save by utilizing technology rather than hiring a recruiter?

Nygaard: I think people who do put their résumé on job boards are more likely to do it again, and I believe they're probably more likely to jump from job to job faster than somebody who is happy with what they're doing, who gets a call from one of us. ... The initial hire might be less expensive going through technology, but when you include training cost and the amount of time that they're there, and then the amount of time it takes to hire again, I would say that going through a traditional recruiter is very competitive, if not a better deal overall.

Beard: Clearly many other vehicles can be less expensive than the search firms. But companies don't so much measure the cost based upon what the upfront cost is as they do over time. So if I were to look at how my clients measure me, it's not if I make the placement, it's how do the people do after they're there. ... The people the Monsters and CareerBuilders have hurt isn't really our industry, it's the newspapers. Because really, all that Monster and CareerBuilder have done is replaced Sunday classified advertisements.

Brown: It depends on how you evaluate cost. People forget the cost of turnover, the cost of productivity. The cost of morale. The cost of all those soft items that it's really difficult to put a dollar item on. If you purely put a dollar item on it, it's significantly less [to use a job board]. But the time spent and all the soft items that are related to it are where the costs really are.

Bainbridge: Pre-screening helps, too. If we have a client that is using the screening system as part of the process when a candidate applies, they provide us with a lot of information. Over time, we then can turn analysis around of what the ideal candidate is -- those people who have done better and stayed longer. So it helps them hone in their recruiting efforts. ... One of our clients is a large restaurant chain with 300 and some locations. They hire 54,000 people a year. They weed through five to 10 times that. Their cost of turnover is their single biggest cost in running their business. Bigger than their bricks and mortar, bigger than their food costs, bigger than anything. When we reduce their turnover by 20 percent, their return on investment for what they pay us is 20-to-1.

Q: Does this also speed up the process?

Bainbridge: It has to do with the level of an individual within an organization, but what we see is that it happens faster by having a screening system in place. Once you understand what [a client's] problem is, the kind of individual that they're looking to hire, you can build systems to identify those people and tee them up quicker so that the HR person's not going through 300 résumés. They're only looking at the top 10 percent, and then from there interviewing the person.

Q: What can a "old fashioned" recruiter do that technology or the Internet can't do?

Beard: Let's use finance as an example. It's probably the highest-demand market out there right now. You go onto a job board right now and try and find someone who is currently employed with Ernst & Young, KMPG, Deloitte -- good luck. You're not going to find them. It goes back to the theory that you can put the job out there on a job board, but there's a very good chance you won't get the right candidate. What it really gets down to is that there's a time and a place where technology can really work. But in other positions, I'm convinced that it's completely worthless. ... Some of my positions that we work on have a salary range of about $80,000 to $130,000. We have spent the last seven years developing an inventory in this area. I just became aware of an opening yesterday at one of the companies in this space. I sent a voice mail and e-mail to the V.P. of sales saying that if you have not backfilled it internally, and I'm always a proponent of that, I can have three people that have the exact skill set you're looking for in front of you within 24 hours or less. That's because we have the inventory. And those people are not on the job boards. And companies know it.

Q: Tell me about the Video Recruiter Online technology that Doherty Staffing developed.

Brown: It's a kiosk-based system that's like a self-service unit for recruiting. A prospective employee can go through a touch screen process and actually have a personal interaction with a recruiter right on the spot and they can get a yes or no whether they're qualified for certain positions or not and then schedule appointments for the recruiters. So you have screening tools in the front end but you also have the personal interaction that I think companies are missing. And as the unemployment market gets tighter and tighter and tighter, people want to talk to people, not computers. And the companies that can really talk to people are the ones that can direct them and do the skill assessments and do all the things that we're concerned technology cannot do.

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