If you’re recruiting candidates, an online hiring resource may be able to offer a lot more help than just advertising your vacant position. Through a major job board such as Monster or Yahoo! HotJobs, some niche sites such as NatureJobs.com or the Jobs classifieds of robust newspaper Web sites you can get much more than an ad for your open position.

If your time and your recruitment success matters to you, don’t post an ad online without verifying that the site offers an applicant tracking system. It will organize responses, send out interview invitations and save your expired ads for later publication. The best ATS products let you ask pre-qualifying interview questions and sort in folders such as Qualified, Invited to Interview, Save for Later Jobs, and Make an Offer.

NatureJobs.com, a science and technology-specific niche job site, is part of Agora Publishing, with offices in Australia and the UK. Through classified platform vendor Adicio its Internet recruiting ad clients are able to advertise for candidates, search a resume database of many thousands of job seekers and keep track of the responses to their job ads. IEEE.org (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) has a career site for its member engineers that s also powered by Adicio, with the same robust ATS capability. Other publisher clients include Working.com and Freedom Community Newspaper’s EmeraldCoast.com, the online home of six Florida newspapers.

Recruiters advertising their open positions with these sites use the vendor’s ATS system to edit, delete, copy, upgrade, renew, deactivate or reactivate their job postings. They can track and store each candidate’s detailed information, and their own or other’s’ internal notes. They can track and store each candidate interview as well as creating and storing customized folders of the candidate’s resumes and each applicant’s response to the job posting.

Two unique and handy products that are part of the Adicio applicant tracking system are its MatchCast and E-Screen. MatchCast is an intelligent matching system that is fully automated. The application instantly matches qualified job candidates with potential employers, which speeds up the candidate hunt.

E-Screen is about sorting the candidate wheat from the chaff. Its database of pre-qualifying background check questions can be customized by each recruiter, who can then require interested candidates to respond to the questions prior to submitting an online application. E-screen speeds up the hunt for the right employee by weeding out the unqualified.

With the Adicio applicant tracking system each employer advertiser is able to score each question included in the set of pre-interview questions. This allows the recruiter to prioritize each question and rate each candidate based on her or his responses.

RedMatch Ltd. is another reputable and sophisticated ATS vendor. Its applicant tracking product, teamed up with The Job Network by Town News, provides many of these same dynamic job hunt tools to recruiters advertising on hundreds of newspaper and shopper job sites.

If you’re a hiring manager and you’re about to post that job online don’t settle for just a job ad – advertise where there’s an applicant tracking system and save yourself, time, effort and money.

Anecdotally, some organizations have typically not spent too much time in the design of entry level jobs. In these cases, the driving idea has been to provide individuals with the opportunity for office time until they were ready for more important assignments.

For the purpose of this analysis however, we assume that entry level roles do not exist within organizations in a vacuum; they are inscribed into a career path which depicts what career progression looks like for a given structure of personnel. In turn, career progression can be illustrated as a line – usually not straight – linked to a hierarchy, one in which the responsibilities associated to higher roles increase in depth and breath.

Career progression as a line of sorts might be an analogy suitable for individual professionals that will move up the ladder or laterally during their tenure. Seldom will moves down the ladder will be programmed or voluntary. Exceptions are still to become material (e.g. soon-to-retire individuals deciding to ramp out of work by taking a demotion in practice for example).

The point here is that it is rare and difficult for organizations to practically encourage and enable professionals to revisit where they came from within a hierarchy. In contrast we assert that, from an human capital management perspective, it would be valuable for organizations to consider career paths as a circular chain, one in which the knowledge and experience obtained over time and a number of jobs held by individual employees is built into the design of entry level positions.

To be sure, we are not advocating that entry level jobs do not get assessed, revisited or modified on the basis of market and industry benchmarks as well as ‘current thinking’. Rather, the proposal is to also loop the experience and intelligence acquired over a professional’s life-span into the definition of an entry level role to enrich it and give it longevity. More specifically, the expected benefits of retro-feeding information obtained from the experience in higher ranking roles into the design of more junior positions are:

1. The productivity of entry level jobs increases; this is the result of having a more tightly integrated role into the hierarchy of the organisation (no stapling and photocopying time for junior)
2. The scope and responsibilities of entry jobs are designed with the future in mind (e.g. what is the set of experiences and skills that need to be emphasized as a junior accountant to perform better as a CFO?)
3. Soft-skills and personal attributes become increasingly important in role definition, specially those referred to individual potential and capacity to performed on a sustained basis
4. Roles and responsibilities can be further productized as understood by Sullivan (Successfully marketing employment products, 2007)
5. Retention rates increase at the beginning of the individual’s career

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