Got a great question the other day:
Why do you think companies have not taken to SEM [search engine marketing] for online recruiting? The major job boards are buying all the recruitment terms – including company names – and organizations could easily "fight back," but very few seem to. If $500 per month on SEM costs results in one new hire per month, that would be pretty good, don’t you think?
- Jason Whitman, VP, Versant Solutions
There are a lot of reasons why HR isn’t "fighting back." Here are a few based on my experience and opinion:
- Fear – In and of itself, not a bad thing. Fear has helped keep us humans alive for a long time, but it’s not going to do much for a company’s bottom line.
- Herd Mentality – No one I know in HR is doing it, so there must be something amiss here. I’ll wait to see how this all plays out before making a move.
- "Good Enough" – What we’re doing now is good enough. We’re sticking with it.
- No Cheerleaders – Aside from me, there aren’t a lot of people or organizations out there preaching search engines to employers. Unfortunately, I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. Job boards aren’t sharing the secret and newspapers and most recruitment ad agencies don’t get it or aren’t ready to give up the big money they get from print, billboards and the like.
- Huh? - The reality is most HR folks glaze over when you start talking about search engine optimization and SEM. (Hell, most marketing and I.T. people do too.) We’re still early in the adoption phase.
That said, I think the No. 1 reason is, drum roll please: Pain … or lack thereof.
Remember when job boards first came onto the scene? The motivation to use them was the quest for IT professionals. The dot-com bubble made it necessary to advertise jobs in places where the computer people were. And that meant the Internet.
In the ’90s, job boards were giving away the shop in hopes of gaining market traction. So, for a few thousand bucks or less, employers could annually have an unlimited number of postings on pretty much any board they wanted. As a result, not only did they post their IT jobs, but all their jobs.
The low level of risk and the heightened level of pain was an invite for everyone to join the party, so most everyone did. The 40 x 40 booths at the SHRM conferences, the billboards on Broadway and the Super Bowl ads didn’t hurt either.
As time passed, employers gained a nice comfort level with job sites. When the economy went into the toilet, employers stuck with job boards and gradually got off print’s pricey morphine drip (too many are still on it, in my opinion, but that’s another story).
Today, there simply isn’t enough pain to think outside the box for most employers. They’re comfortable.
It’s only in industries like health care and specific I.T. proficiencies where pain is part of the recruiting landscape. That’s changing, mind you, but it’s still the norm.
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August 11th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
The question is answered quite easily. There is a lack of Recruitment professionals that not only understand internet technologies but also that can then can “sell” the efficiencies of Internet technologies to the corporation.
Peter Weddle summarized it well when he said, “There are thousands of recruiters using the Internet to source candidates, but precious few are using the medium to recruit them.”
University of Pennsylvania refers to professionals that can bridge technology with funcational area expertise as “interlocketers”. I first heard this term when I went to a meeting about the Executive Master’s in Technology Management at Wharton. http://www.seas.upenn.edu/profprog/emtm/admissions.html.
Recruitment and HR in general lacks these “Interlocketers” to drive this shift.