Recruitment 2.0

Online vs Offline applications – what to do?

Clients often say: “It’s great that we’ve implemented a new online recruitment system, but how should we handle off-line applicants?”

Whilst there isn’t a simple answer to this, your decision should be based around the following factors:

• Likelihood of applicants applying online;
• How hard you want to force people into making an online application;
• Social demographic of probable candidate-base.

It’s tricky to get right straight away and will take some time to get a good balance.

If you have the budget, by far the best way to determine the starting point is to undertake some research. Ensure your research targets both existing and potential employees as well as hiring managers.

Whether you undertake a full research study or not, the most important thing to do is to monitor applicants and listen to candidates and hiring managers. Like many things in life, you’ll need to manage this by exception. By this I mean you’ll spend more time working out what doesn’t work, rather than what does. You’ll know if the  balance is tipped in the wrong direction because you’ll be handling higher (or lower) volumes of applications than is necessary. So, as you’ll note from a number of posts in this blog: management information is key – simply having the information to understand what’s going on is key.

Here are some examples and possible solutions

Example 1 – Your demographic should be ‘online capable’
Sectors: lawyers, accountants, bankers, engineering, media, other professional services, etc.
Here, we have a large professional community who are used to working in offices, and ergo should be web-literate. These people should be able to apply online.

We would probably recommend not allowing offline applicants in this case, as the ability to apply online becomes part of the qualification for the job itself. If you do receive offline applicants, just politely send them a postcard or an email clearly informing them how to apply online.

Exceptions: positions where you know that you have a heavily candidate-driven market. In this situation you don’t want to put people off applying by making them go through a long and complex application process, so you should allow for people to apply offline.

Example 2 – Your demographic is probably not ‘online capable’
Sectors: casual labour, construction, outdoor work, transport, short term/temporary work, etc.
In this example we have candidates that are probably more likely to move jobs more than most due to the nature of their industry. These candidates are more likely to be less web literate. In this example we have a problem… Or do we?

We often see that these candidates will ask their spouses, children, or parents to apply online for them. So, whilst I don’t believe there’s a problem in this area – it would be good to know the proportion of people who ‘appear’ to be applying online, but in reality are not doing it themselves. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to capture this kind of information as equal opportunities data.

The best course of action here is to encourage candidates to apply online but still have an offline process – using all the normal components: telephone line, application form, etc.

It’s also important to note, that whilst these candidates are unlikely to go online themselves to check their email every five minutes, they will almost certainly be ‘text-message’ capable, i.e. able to receive and respond to text messages. Whilst this doesn’t provide a solution to candidate attraction, this can be helpful during selection phases.

Example 3 – An unknown mixture of 1 & 2 above.
Sectors: varied.
The first two examples are simple and clear cut, the third is much more complex and contentious. Here we are in the middle ground, we have candidates who might be able to apply online, but also a proportion may not. In fact the best candidate for the job may not be web-literate at all.

In this case, the most important thing to do is put a system in place and monitor it. Gather business intelligence from hiring managers – “how many candidates would they expect to receive for this job?” If you feel candidates aren’t applying in the volumes you would expect, put a phone number on the website, or as part of the job spec. Any decent ATS/recruitment management system should be able to put a recruitment hotline number on specific jobs/job groups.

A footnote on disabilities
A mechanism should always be provided for candidates with disabilities who are simply unable to apply online due to a disability. Always ensure that you state very clearly on your careers website that disabled candidates can apply offline. To not allow this could be seen as discriminatory.

Summary
The golden rule, as always, is make your recruitment process fit what you are trying to achieve and monitor it regularly. If you are getting too many applicants, make the application form harder – ask more questions, if you aren’t getting enough turn the application form down a little, and advertise a telephone number for applicants. Then monitor how many calls you receive.

This is an issue that recruiters face every day. Do you have any good examples ways to deal with online and offline applications? I’d love to hear from you. Please make a comment on this blog and share your experiences with us.

- Mike

Equality commission reporting in Northern Ireland - Tripping over your own FETO?

One of our clients recently asked for our help in pulling together information for their periodic Article 55 review by the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. It's all part of the, arguably out-dated, Fair and Equal Treatment Order (FETO) introduced in 1976.

I had a look at the report and was at first terrified by the size of the thing. I imagine recruiters feel pretty much the same way when they see it. Luckily for our client, filling in a lot of the required information was a breeze thanks to their use of our recruitment management system - they already captured almost all of the necessary information, so it was just a case of producing the right reports. Without an RMS/ATS, I dread to think how organisations pull this information together in a consistent format without a great deal of manual process.

There were a few other quirks which I found interesting with regards to putting the report together. In Northern Ireland, you have to collect information on the gender and community background of candidates - i.e. catholic or protestant along with the "Standard Occupational Classification" (SOC). It's against the law for employers not to provide this report, so you have to ask the relevant questions on your application form for Northern Ireland-based jobs as you need the figures for all applicants to compare with those shortlisted and those hired as well as for promotees and job leavers.

Now things get weird. Candidates, of course, don't have to answer the questions. They have to be able to say that they "do not feel that they belong to either community" or "do not wish to state which community they belong to". Indeed a large number, or even a majority, of candidates now do this.

With that in mind, even more bizarre is that if the candidate opts not to answer the question, apparently employers still have to forcibly assign them to a community background for the purposes of the Article 55 review. They have to do this based on a "best guess" from other information on the form using what is known as the "residual method". The guidance suggests that the information you can use for this includes:

• Surname and other names
• Address
• Schools attended (whether in Northern Ireland or elsewhere)
• Sporting or other leisure pursuits or interests
• Any course of work undertaken for any recognised award, examination or qualification
• Clubs, societies or other organisations belonged to
• The occupation as a clergyman of a particular denomination or as a teacher in a particular school of any referee given by the individual when s/he applied for employment

This all seemed crazy to me. And what about Northern Irish Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Atheists, etc? Who's monitoring equality for them? What about people applying for a job in Northern Ireland who aren't from or don't live there?

Anyway, regardless of whether this is outdated legislation or not, with candidates not answering the question and with the continuing integration between the communities in Northern Ireland, there is an extra burden upon the employer in terms of the number of candidates who need to be classified using the residuary method. So, this all got me thinking - can you or we do anything else to make this process easier?

• Be prepared. Make sure you record the relevant information in such a way that you can easily get the reports you need.
• Design reports that help apply the residual method, showing all relevant available data in one place.
• Obviously, if you haven't got an ATS, we'd suggest investing in one - it will make your life easier in many ways - and not just when you need to do your review!
• I was thinking that we could produce a report template for our clients that looked just like the official one, but which sucked the relevant data into the relevant sections over the web automatically at the touch of a button. We already do this for other types of reports, so why not for this one? On the commercial side, would people pay for that?
• Automated email to candidates to let them know what you've assigned them to, so they have an opportunity to contact you and change this if they wish.
• Don't restrict yourself to just reporting on Catholics and Protestants. Be ahead of the game and get into the habit of regularly monitoring other community backgrounds/religions/gender, etc. as well. Be sure your process is fair for all and then shout about that with the stats to back it up.

I wonder if the day will come when governments will be able to accept these kinds of reports so they can click the button whenever they need to or even have employers feed it through to their database in real time. And would organisations be happy to be that transparent? Probably not - on both counts!

Finally, here's some useful links from the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland website if you want to find out more:

• Fair employment and Monitoring
• Article 55 Review - A Guide for Employers
• Step by Step Guide to Monitoring (PDF)

- David