Canadian employers lagging behind in use of corporate Web sites for recruitment

If Web site recruiting is the wave of the future, European and American companies are riding that wave while Canada paddles behind.

According to iLogos, a research company that monitors trends in online recruiting, employees are the key to success in today’s knowledge-based market. It has identified 20 “best practices” for online recruiting and uses those practices as the benchmark to rate certain companies. Those practices are:

•Link to careers section from the homepage

•About the company: benefits

•About the company: culture

•A college recruiting section

•Job search by job category

•Job search by location

•Job search by keyword

•Urgent need jobs highlighted

•Complete job description

•One click to apply

•Pre-assessment tool customized for each position

•Choice of cut-and-paste form or resume builder

•Attachment of formatted resume

•Application automatically connected to a job

•Anonymous application

•E-mail to a friend

•Job agent

•Profiling

•Reuse of candidate information for multiple applications

•Online user feedback.

iLogos' recent study, Best Practices for European 500 Career Web Site Recruiting, is a follow-up to a similar study it completed six months ago on Fortune 500 companies. That study included an addendum regarding the Web site recruiting habits of Canada’s top 100 companies.

Using the new data from Europe, iLogos has been able to compare online recruiting practices in Canada with those adopted by the Fortune 500 and European 500 companies. That comparison reveals that Canadian companies are not using their Web sites to the same degree as the Fortune 500 and European 500 companies to “attract, convince and capture” potential qualified candidates.

Here are some of the key comparison results:

Have a “Careers” section on its corporate Web site: 64 per cent of Canadian top 100 companies, as compared to 89 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 76 per cent of the European 500 companies;

Have a link from the corporate home page to the careers page: 47 per cent of Canadian top 100 companies, as compared to 73 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 62 per cent of the European 500 companies;

Post job positions on site: 45 per cent of Canadian top 100 companies, as compared to 76 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 55 per cent of the European 500 companies;

Post job positions and accept online applications: 42 per cent of Canadian top 100 companies, as compared to 71 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 52 per cent of the European 500 companies;

Have Web sites with the ability to search a database of available jobs: 17 per cent of Canadian top 100 companies, as compared to 42 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 24 per cent of the European 500 companies;

Provide separate college or entry-level recruiting section: 21 per cent of Canadian top 100 companies, as compared to 42 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 47 per cent of the European 500 companies; and

Provide information on corporate culture: 37 per cent of Canadian top 100 companies, as compared to 44 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 41 per cent of the European 500 companies.

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