Today, nearly every recruitment-related company vaunts some kind of online recruitment presence dubbed ‘candidate portal’. This term has become so over-used and to mean so many things that it has become meaningless.
Some companies use the term ‘candidate portal’ to refer to a generic website. This often amounts to little more than an html page with a company name and logo. Some staffing companies who have chugged a little further upstream have put an email address on it. Less often, they put a phone number on it, forgetting that most of us still want to talk to a real person to get help.
A higher-end candidate portal involves much more. Candidates register with it simply by emailing or pasting a resume to an automated parsing facility that creates their profile. This may seem obvious, but if you’ve tried out Monster you know the pain of filling out many screens of data.
User-friendly job boards make it easy for candidates to revisit and update their profile at any time. They can search for jobs, upload certification documents or send inquiry messages to recruiters. Job agents make it possible for candidates to receive notification of upcoming job opportunities.
More service-oriented are candidate portals with a dual purpose: recruitment and onboarding. Recruiting refers to the resume submission, interview and offer stage. Onboarding involves those things that happen once a candidate accepts an offer and begins employment.
Benefits, career opportunities, time card submissions, and notifications get communicated from the same portal as the initial recruitment site.
Candidate portals can only be as good as the systems behind them. A staffing company can best leverage its portal with an operational system that automatically notifies recruiters of an incoming hot candidate.
Once a recruiter begins a direct relationship with a candidate, all of the contact with the candidate through email should automatically be saved with the candidate record. Resume submissions to clients, as well as interviews and any offer acceptance and rejection data, should also integrate with the candidate portal data.
Today, companies that truly pursue the best employment practices will settle for nothing less than a candidate portal that fully integrates with a 360 degree view of the employment life cycle.
