Service suits hits big employers

By ADAM GIFFORD

Recruitment advertising placement specialist Haines Recruitment Advertising has signed up the National Australia Bank worldwide as a customer for its new Haines e-Recruiting service.

Development director Jonathan Wyles says the service is built around the e-Recruiter software suite from Texan company Hire.com. Haines has the New Zealand licence.

Telecom and South Auckland Health are also using the service, and e-Recruiter has been integrated into the back end of Haines' nzjobs.co.nz job board.

Mr Wyles says it is a service which suits companies with at least 700 staff or which hire vigorously because of high growth. It powers corporate web sites with a suite of web-based employment tools.

The role of the job board is to channel traffic to e-Recruiter, which gives corporate clients their own talent pool to manage. It also gives them a tool they can use for career development, so they can profile their staff with a view to filling vacancies and promoting from within.

E-Recruiter contains filters to profile and qualify candidates as they come into the pool and match them with a job profile. Many such filter products are available.

Mr Wyles says one of the reasons the Hire.com solution was chosen was the company's client list - Fortune 500 companies like Boeing, Microsoft and EDS - and the quality of its board and backers, including venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins and the Hearst media group.

"We were looking for innovation. We figured we had some compelling things to take to market," he says.

These are: a specialist focus on building employment brands; the communication that goes with that; the top New Zealand job board; more traffic than others - 195,000 individuals visited last month; and wider range of clients and jobs.

"We had a story to tell but it wasn't a complete story. What was missing from the mix was about empowering the clients so they can have control over their own talent for jobs."

Most sites scare off the passive candidates, those who keep a weather eye out for that perfect job, he says.

"If the barriers are sufficiently low, they will leave a profile or footprint of what they are looking for. What is out there now on sites takes too much time to complete. People have to give too much confidential information about who they are and they have to leave resumes.

"You need the ability to match job applications with what people aspire to do. A lot of systems now are resume search and retrieval systems that record what people have done, but not what they want to do."

Haines now gets 25 per cent of its revenue from internet-based products, compared with 2 per cent two years ago. Visits to nzjobs.co.nz have doubled over the past year. e-Recruiter is changing the company again, he says.

"With the tools being integrated into the back end, nzjobs has moved from being a job board - where opportunities are advertised - to being a place talent is screened and people are filtered.

"Those filtered out are communicated with by the job board automatically and we deliver a shortlist to the client."