e -recruitment

The age of information technology is fast catching up with one aspect of business that used to be thought of as "low tech" – human resources.

"The online recruitment industry is still very small in the Philippines, having started only a few years ago. It accounts for less than 5% of the total recruitment advertising industry compared to 12% in the United States," said JobStreet.com Phils. Inc. general manager Candice Alabanza-Izog.

Jobstreet Phils. is a joint venture of a Malaysian group and the J.G. Summit Holdings. It was first lodged under Summit Internet Investments, which manages the IT investments of the Gokongwei Group. Today, it is organizationally under Summit Media, which manages the holding company’s publications business.

"When we decided to partner up with JobStreet in 1999, the Malaysian business was already on the path to profitability after operating for four years. Here was a web business that had a viable business model," said JobStreet Phils. vice-president for finance Lisa Gokongwei.

Aside from the Philippines, Jobstreet operates out of eight other offices in Asia and serves the recruitment needs of about 8,000 clients. Over the years, the company has accumulated a talent pool of close to 1.8 million job seekers.

Client friendly

As in any other industry, the key to success is to offer value added services to clients. "Putting up a dotcom, as we have all discovered too late in the game, is not about cashing out. It’s about having a clear business model from the very start," Gokongwei said. "In JobStreet, we have the opportunity to innovate in the job classifieds business. JobStreet also allows knowledge workers and talent to control their career destinies by equipping them with information about the job marketplace at anytime and anyplace."

Data confidentiality is also guaranteed. "The company doesn’t use the information entrusted to them by users without their consent," said Alabanza-Izog.

In the last two and a half years, the Philippine operation has served the recruitment needs of close to 2,000 companies. It has more than 500 job listings on the website on any given day (as soon as a company decides to post an advertisement online, the ad is automatically uploaded onto the job listing page) and boasts a fill rate success of 60%. This means that of the total number of jobs reported as filled by companies who advertised in JobStreet.com, 60% were done through the website.

During the same period, its local database of users has also grown to nearly 400,000. That number is expected to increase by 25% by the end of the year.

A major factor that drags the growth of e-recruitment is the lack of Internet facilities and training among corporate hiring personnel. To address this, Alabanza-Izog and her staff of 20 have been conducting weekly training sessions on Internet usage. They have also been on the look out for ways to simplify online recruitment technologies and make them more user friendly.

"The only way to stay ahead of the others in the industry is by constantly improving our technologies to address the growing needs of our clients," Alabanza-Izog said. A case in point is JobStreet’s resume management system, SiVA, which has been upgraded three times since the Philippine operation started.

Apart from job postings on the site, JobStreet offers executive search services in which consultants will do the initial screening of applicants and conduct first round interviews to ensure that only the most qualified candidates are forwarded to clients. They’ve also gone into ASP licensing, which includes customizing and building the data management system for their clients.