Having been on a wonderful holiday in Spain recently, I am posting today some of the recent happenings I have picked up on online recruiting in Europe, with a view to what that means for the Middle East and Africa.
Firstly, huge areas of Spain have no mobile connection and the Internet goes down when it rains - so just as when the postal system used to deliver letters a week to late - if you are sending offer letters out now via email, it may be worth considering simple back up plans such as sms messages or post/fax; or even copying emails to a private url so candidates can pick up copies of all emails sent to them. We've just provided training of a web based recruitment platform to a client in Sudan in North Africa, and the Internet connection speeds were not fantastic - but certainly good enough to run a business application for recruiting over the Net, and for job applications to be made.
8 Link Deep Mining:
Did you know that the crawlers sent out by search engines like google.com (to search and index every website out there) will literally crawl 8 links (clicks) deep and read all the pages within that reach? There's a catch though, they won't mine or crawl through JavaScript, SO if you have a subset of really interesting pages about what it's like to work for your company on a careers site, or even your jobs listings, if the link to them is a flashy button with JavaScript controls - then they will be invisible to search engine crawlers!!
Why is that so important? Well, if a job description includes the words "Dubai, 777, tax-free and Pilot", somebody could run a yahoo or google search for that exact phrase and your job or jobsite wouldn't even appear. You can see why I thought this was worth a mention, and please make sure you know what you're doing if you're thinking about building a careers portal.
Going back to my first point about candidate communications, I saw from a Guardian newspapers study that 1 in 50 URL's requested by UK employees while at work is a house or job-hunting site. However, of websites requested but blocked by employers, the study showed webmail to be in the top 3. So basically their seems to be a trend of employers blocking access to webmail providers such as hotmail.com, yahoo.com etc. So those of you using recruitment technology which makes it possible to communicate with thousands of candidates in a day and organise mass events such as career fairs or assessment centres at the click of a button - be aware that candidates may not be seeing your emails that quickly. The same can be said of course for jobseekers that use their work email ID's (why would you ever do that, but believe me many do), they can't often access work emails for days on end.
Encouraging applicants to come back to a webpage to see communications, sign up for sms alerts or even set up their own rss feeds will have to become more widely used.
Traditional Hiring & the Induction Process:
On my return into Dubai International Airport from Europe at midnight I was amazed to see about 200 engineers being herded sheep-like through immigration with 'lost and confused' written all over their faces. Their Herders were two chaps either side of the line holding aloft pieces of paper with "KBR New Hires". Good to see traditional recruiting still going strong, I just hope they got put into a decent hotel and didn't have to start work the next morning else I suspect half of them will be on a plane back home within two months.
I'll write later on how the web is working today to provide smooth onboarding, and remove that 'rabbit in the headlights' look from the faces of your new hires.
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