In my current research, I seek to understand how the Internet has
affected a key organizational process: the procurement of employees.
The current economic boom, fueled in part by the growth of the Internet-based
economy, has produced an unprecedented level of demand for workers,
particularly in the high tech sector. These circumstances have touched
off a "War for Talent," with employers scrambling to attract
new employees. Just as it has changed the way many goods and services
are procured in the new economy, the Internet has begun to transform
the ways that firms identify, recruit, hire (or contract) and retain
employees.
My research has several phases. The first step is to map the role
that the Internet plays at the various phases of the hiring process.
Here, I seek to understand how hiring firms integrate the Internet
with their other recruitment and hiring practices.
My preliminary research in this area has identified a complex landscape.
Perhaps the simplest change is that many firms have added recruitment-related
information to their company web sites. This mirrors the adding
of "clicks" to "bricks" strategy of many retailers.
Some traditional labor market intermediaries (e.g., executive search
firms such as Korn-Ferry) have also pursued a strategy of adding
an Internet component to their existing operations (Future-step.com).
But more intriguing has been the emergence of a set of Internet
companies that offer web based imple-
mentations for a wide variety of hiring and contracting functions.
Some of these services focus on expanding the recruiting horizon
and lowering the cost of search. For example, Monster.com offers
a resume posting service in many major markets across a wide variety
of jobs. Other sites specifically target particular segments of
the labor market; e.g., Dice.com focuses on the market for high
tech contract and free-lance employees. (Mybizoffice.com administers
bene-
fits for contract employees). Other web sites purport to solve the
firm's matching problem, i.e., choosing from among the multitude
of applicants the candidate that is uniquely matched to the employer's
particular needs (e.g., Ixmatch.com, Zrep.com). Other firms (e.g.,
Referral.com, Angami.com) offer to manage hiring firms' payment
of recruitment bounties for employee referrals. Still other firms
(e.g., Ijob.com, Icarian.com) offer "end-to-end" ERP-style
solutions, from sourcing, to applicant and interview tracking, to
job offer and benefits administration, to post-hire retention tracking.
While more exploratory work needs to be done in order to fully
understand the nature of this rapidly changing space, my ultimate
goal in this research is to assess the major value proposition of
the Internet in this arena. Specifically, I seek to measure the
degree to which the Internet has lowered the costs of these human
resources functions. While the cost of search for new candidates
has certainly gone down (the cost of advertising on the Monster
board appears to be cheaper than advertising via traditional newspaper
channels), this might result in costs having been moved elsewhere.
Many firms get too many resumes to screen as a result of such ads,
thus increasing their screening costs. Companies have sprung up
offering to solve the "too many resumes" problem, but
they, too, are not free, so costs might be moving somewhere else.
Building on my past research on the relative costs of traditional
hiring channels, I seek to sort out the true costs of Internet based
recruiting and hiring by comparing the costs and benefits of Web-based
recruitment and hiring practices to non-Web-related recruitment
and hiring channels (e.g., traditional newspaper advertisements,
head hunters, employee referrals). In order to empirically address
this question, I will gather data from the end users of the system,
i.e., the hiring firms. In this effort, I will seek to partner with
one or more of the E-Business partner firms (see below).
This research makes important contributions to both basic economic
science and business practice. This research will serve to clarify
the role of information in the screening and matching processes
at the heart of the hiring process. Second, from a practical perspective,
this research will assess a major value proposition of the Internet
in this arena by measuring the degree to which the Internet has
lowered the costs of human resources functions.
