Home : Newsletters : 2001 : August
The online recruitment industry is still relatively immature and lacks legislative regulation that could improve the experiences of job seekers and recruiters. Online recruitment sites are currently classified as employment agencies under the 1973 Employment Agencies Act, this badly needs updating and although new legislation in the form of an update to the act is due, it may still leave many areas uncovered by legislation.
In the absence of government involvement in online recruitment, it is up to other bodies to take the lead in regulating our industry. The body best placed to do this in the UK is the Association of Online Recruiters (AOLR). The AOLR is a specialist division of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC). The REC exists to champion the providers of recruitment solutions and have a large number of members in the form of recruitment consultancies. In addition to lobbying on behalf of the recruitment industry, the REC’s code of practice aims to raise and maintain standards amongst its members, for example the code of practice stipulates that all advertised vacancies must be live and available at the time of going to press.
With the backing of the REC, the AOLR should be in a strong position to play a similar role within the online recruitment industry. The AOLR also has a code of conduct, which includes guidelines regarding two key issues within the online recruitment industry; candidate confidentiality and obtaining the permission of employers to advertise vacancies.
The industry has made significant progress in addressing the first issue and much credit for this must go to the job sites themselves. A year ago the press was filled with online security horror stories, including online bank account details being accessing and an energy company’s customer accounts being freely available to anyone visiting the site. Online job seekers had similar concerns to those banking online; the primary worry for online job seekers was that if they registered their CV online it may fall into the hands of their boss or HR Manager and their job seeking activities be discovered.
Although the latest ORES (Workthing / BMRB) research shows that just under half of online job seekers retain concerns about confidentiality, online recruitment sites have made significant progress by taking the confidentiality issue seriously.
Peoplebank now has over 160,000 registered users with completed CV’s that are fully searchable by employers and no personal details are passed onto employers without the candidate’s permission. Workthing uses three levels of security to put users in control of their personal information online and will even contact candidates every single time an employer wants to view their details if the candidate requests that level of security. Some specialist sites, such as Careers in Recruitment, encourage employers to contact candidates via the site; this fulfils two ends, putting candidates and employers directly in touch and maintaining candidate anonymity.
The issue of obtaining the employer’s permission to post a vacancy is highlighted by the ’scraping’. Scraping involves copying jobs from other job sites with the aim to boost the number of jobs available on the scraper’s site.
Scraping is a concern for both job seekers and recruiters because those using scraped jobs do not have the permission of the employer to advertise their vacancies; this can be a problem for two reasons.
Firstly sites hosting scraped jobs might not be aware of special instructions given by the employer to their chosen job site regarding the vacancy closing date. Consequently vacancies may be displayed to candidates after the closing date and employers may receive applications long after the position has been filled. Not only does this create extra work for the HR Manager but it also leaves the unsuccessful candidate with a poor impression of the entire online recruitment process.
In addition to attracting response after the closing date, scraped jobs can also attract response from candidates not targeted by the employer for that specific vacancy. A good example of this would be a vacancy placed by an employer on a niche site whose users are specialists in a certain industry, if this job is then copied by a more generalist site, then the employer may begin to receive applications from users without the appropriate skills or experience. Again this creates additional work for the HR professional and does not help further the cause of online recruitment with the unsuccessful candidate.
StepStone have successfully challenged the right of other sites to scrape or link to their jobs in Germany, but there have been no similar legal actions in the UK and despite the forthcoming updates to the 1973 Employment Agencies Act, the issue of scraping is still a problem in this country.
In the absence of domestic regulation, the role of the AOLR to self govern the industry is vital. As part of the REC the AOLR is only a year old and as such is still growing in influence, but supporting the AOLR now could bring dividends in the future and a provide a chance for the online recruitment community to have a much greater influence in future government legislation.