Talent Management Processes

Low Cost/High Exposure

by Taleo Research

Increasingly, corporations are placing resources towards the corporate Careers Web site as a central point for the staffing strategy. A survey for the Taleo Research report Where The Jobs Are: Fortune 500 Job Postings on Careers Web Sites & Major Job Boards found that 81 percent of Fortune 500 companies are posting jobs on the corporate Web site. In fact, that survey found 75,000 job positions posted to the corporate Careers Web site by the Fortune 500 companies. Both the percentage of companies posting to the corporate Careers site, and the aggregate number of jobs posted greatly exceeds the posting activity of Fortune 500 companies on the major job boards.

Why is the corporate Careers Web site showing such dominance over the commercial job boards? Large corporations benefit from excellent consumer branding and receive substantial traffic to the corporate Web site and its adjunct Careers Web site. For those well-branded corporations, the Careers Web site is a low cost, high exposure solution. It provides the opportunity for the corporation to take advantage of its full stream of corporate Web site visitors including customers, investors, and even competitors. The corporate Careers site provides a company with its own branded venue through which it can communicate and begin to form valuable relationships with potential future employees.

As the research shows, the Fortune 500 are discovering that a strong brand awareness and healthy corporate Web site traffic can be put to good use to help gain exposure to those open job positions, by listing the positions on a corporate Careers Web site. For small and medium sized enterprises (SME), that do not have stand-alone branding and high volume corporate Web site traffic, postings to job boards will continue to provide needed visibility.

1. Use the corporate Web site for all job listings

As the use of the Internet increases, and corporate Web sites become the main media for public information about a company, the Web site traffic to the corporations’ own sites will continue to build. Many corporations have the opportunity to maximize the benefits it receives from its own site by mining the visitor traffic, using best practices to optimize the Careers section, and having streamlined back-end processing in place to effectively meet corporate staffing goals.

Taleo Research predicts that it will become a common corporate practice to list all available positions not only to the corporate Careers Web site, but also to the company intranet to leverage their employees and Web site visitors into the corporate database of candidates. Traffic to corporate Careers Web sites will only increase, as jobseekers discover them to be the most comprehensive source of available job positions.

Corporations can further streamline processes through implementation of systems that expedite job posting to the corporate Careers site, provide seamless multiposting interfaces to job boards as well as integrated posting to corporate intranets for internal posting for employee redeployment and referrals, and have access gateways for third-party staffing providers.

2. Monitor spending and productivity per source through automated source tracking

To best correlate spending for the required results, companies can record the source of quality candidates (those that make it to the interview stage), and the number of hires per source (in this case, per job board). A robust back-end system should automate source tracking to a high degree.

As adoption rates for corporate Careers Web sites rise, and the mere possession of a corporate Careers Web site no longer remains a differentiator for competitive advantage, companies will pay increasing attention to optimizing the Careers Web site. Most efforts will focus on integrating the corporate Careers Web site with back-end staffing management systems. Benefits of implementation will include faster response to highly time-sensitive quality candidates. More ambitious undertakings will place the corporate Careers Web site at the center of a Web of online services—the staffing supply chain—that may include job boards and also background checking, response management and talent relationship management.