Breaking Down Barriers to a Perfect Recruiting Ecosystem

In a world of perfect information, every employer would know the perfect fit candidate for every job opening throughout the entire enterprise. Likewise, every professional would know exactly when an opportunity arises that meets his/her qualifications
and desires.

That vision isn’t too far fetched. The absence of information – or really, the free flow of information – is the only thing separating the present state of affairs from the vision stated above.

This paper briefly examines the specific barriers preventing today’s job marketplace from achieving the perfect recruiting ecosystem. Real world examples are provided, and the availability of modern Internet technology is introduced into the equation.

Conceived by Rob McGovern, former CEO and founder of CareerBuilder and current CEO and founder of Jobfox, ResuméPal represents a major movement in the online recruiting world with the promise of propelling it closer to a world of perfect information.

ResuméPal is being brought to market by an initial group of major human resources technology vendors including ADP, Jobfox, Kenexa, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Silkroad technologies, and Softscape.

Today’s Greatest Recruiting Challenges
Several factors plague today’s online job marketplace, from both the job seeker’s and the employer’s perspectives. While recruiting and job searching technologies of the 1990s and early 2000s were designed to make it easier for employers and qualified job seekers to find each other, arguably the opposite has occurred.

Prior to the development of online job boards, job seekers were naturally limited to the number of jobs they could apply to, given the manual process (and cost) of printing and mailing or faxing resumes and cover letters to prospective employers. As such, self-qualification prevented candidates from excessively applying to jobs they had less likelihood of obtaining. If nothing else, the sheer time and expense limited job seekers to the number of jobs to which they could apply.

The job boards changed all that, with the development of sites like Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder in the late 1990’s. Email made it fast, easy, and virtually free for candidates to apply to any job found on the job boards, which were essentially newspaper
classified ads on an Internet web page.

This swung the burden of the job marketplace into the hands of employers, suddenly inundated with electronic resumes emailed from job seekers using the job boards.

Out of this came the birth of the ATS (applicant tracking system) – essentially a customer relationship management system for employers to manage thousands, tens of thousands, and at the largest enterprises – hundreds of thousands of applications processed annually.
While the ATS may have improved the flow of applicants from the job board to a common database shared by all recruiters throughout the enterprise, today’s ATS still leaves several areas relatively untouched:

1. Reducing the quantity of unqualified job seekers applying to jobs.

2. Maintaining current professional information and contact details on past applicants.

3. Finding candidates with matching skill sets among current and past applicants.

4. Routing job applicants across space and time to the best jobs throughout the enterprise, at present and in the future.

5. Relatively low return-on-investment from traditional job boards.

Turning Vision into Reality
The good news is, these challenges aren’t insurmountable. We live in a world where the technology is readily available to address these challenges, and technology fostering the free flow of information is used every day with the advent of wildly popular social networking sites like FaceBook and Twitter.