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eading
on-line talent site. At the same time,
Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor
Professor of Management at the Wharton
School ofthe University of Pennsylvania
in Philadelphia and the director of
Wharton's Center for Human Resources.
His article "A Market-Driven Approach to
Retaining Talent" appeared in HBR's
January-February 2000 issue. He can be
reached at cappelU@wharton.upenn.edu.
thousands of corporate recruiters are
scouring Monster's database of more
than 18 million employee profiles and
r^sum^s, most for people who aren't actively
seeking new jobs. Millions more
profiles and r^sumds are posted on
5,000 or so smaller job boards.
The labor market, in other words,
has at last become a true market: wide
open, uncontrolled by individual companies,
and unconstrained by geography.
And executives need to start
treating it like a market. No longer can
recruiting be viewed as a reactive,
largely clerical function buried in the
human resources department. It needs
to be refashioned to look much more
like the marketing function itself. The
hiring process, after all, has become
nearly indistinguishable from the marketing
process. Job candidates today
need to be approached in much the
same way as prospective customers:
carefully identified and targeted, attracted
to the company and its brand,
and then sold on the job. In an environment
with fierce competition for talent,
companies that master the art and
science of on-line recruiting will attract
and keep the best people.
The on-line hiring process can be broken
down into three steps: attracting,
sorting, and contacting candidates. A
company seeking to improve its hiring
capability should take a close look at
each step, with its evolving techniques
and technologies, as well as at a final
step that doesn't require the Internet at
all: closing the deal. (See the exhibit
"Four Steps to Making the Hire.")
Attracting Candidates. In large,
open, competitive markets, brands and
reputations are crucial. That's always
been true for product markets, and now
it's true for labor markets, too. All of
a company's promotions, advertising,
and other marketing efforts infiuence
prospective employees and consimiers.
A recent survey by WetFeet.com, which
provides applicants with information
about employers, showed that product
ads are surprisingly important in reaching
candidates. In that survey, fully 20%
of job seekers had applied to companies
as a result of having seen product ads.
Four Steps to
Making the Hire
On-line technology and the most
current hiring-management-systems
software are crucial to companies
competing for the best candidates
in a high-speed job market.
But the human touch Is still
indispensable.
Integrating recruiting efforts with
overall marketing campaigns is thus the
most important thing companies can do
to ensure their success in on-line hiring.
Sophisticated companies build immediately
recognizable human-resources
brands by tying product ads to recruiting
ads through the use of similar formats,
colors, and styles. Promotions such
as company hats and T-shirts printed
with a URL can drive many people to an
organization's Web site, where on-line
recruiting systems operate and the HR
brands are reinforced.
Corporate home pages s