Thoughts On Stuff – Net Natives

This question is being asked a lot at the moment as the BSI looks to work Online Recruitment world looks to create a set of standards to measure and track the best practices for the online recruitment industry.

There have been a lot of discussion about it over at our Recruitment Futurology Group.

I  was invited to attend the first BSI meeting about 18 months ago. It was a good turn out, the CEOs or directors from every major UK job board and senior representatives from REC.

The issue was (and is) over responsibility. If a job board adheres to a standard set of principles, but the person who posts the jobs (the recruiters) do not, then where is the value of that kite mark? At that time, there was unilateral agreement that it couldn’t work.

But why not? Why not have a common set of principles across all of the job boards. Why not say that as a job board, you should only publish jobs that are for REAL vacancies, where EVERY candidate will be notified of acceptance or failure, where there is a common complaints procedure and which are bound by a set of metrics that measure success?

As a recruitment owner, I would love to be able to say to my clients that we only work with job boards that have the BSI standard. As a business, we adhere to those metrics, why shouldn’t our suppliers?

Why shouldn’t the job board industry want to try to do what’s best for the clients, candidates and industry as a whole?

As the MD of one of the Job Boards said to me in another forum, “Steve – if only all recruiters adhered to a set of principles around candidate management – sadly, as we all know, they do not. For Job Boards I suspect its a bit like ‘biting the hand that feeds them’. They grew up on staffing industry billings and came to rely on them – turning on them in this approach would risk 50% of their revenues I suspect.”

I think that pretty much sums it up…!