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refully. Let us now consider some of the new approaches to preemployment screening that can be timesaving and good value for employers and appear to be fair to potential employees. Preemployment screening tools: At the simplest level, the development of 24hour telephone prescreening as reported, in HR Magazine seems to have provided potential candidates with more flexible arrangements. HR Easy Inc analyse10,000 calls received during one 24 hour period to its clients using its custommade programs that screen applicants via a touchtone phone. Sixty nine per cent were place outside traditional business hours (Rubis, 1998). Another example of this approach is provided by Stores New York (see Schulz, 1998) and illustrates how small retailers are able to identify likely applicants through two tiers of questioning in an automated program. In this example, the retailers, Hot Topic and Stew Leonard, advertised the vacancy and gave details of a toll free telephone number. When an applicant pleted the session successfully, an interview with a live human being was scheduled automatically. This leads me to wonder how the employer copes with a potential large number of successful applicants? And are the questions really designed to test people39。s Web site before taking the job and yet more spend an average of four hours on a corporate Web site doing a job search. Changing demands on the HR function: This increased interest in, and use of, the Inter by job seekers does however bring its own problems. The August 1999 edition of Workforce (see for subscription details) quotes several examples of panies that have responded in differing ways to this development. The examples range from Irvine, Mazda North American Operation, which decided to devote 25 per cent of its recruitment budget to an Inter recruitment service to Princess Cruises, which does not want to share their employment practices with petitors. American Express at considers the need to have a variety of recruitment strategies of which online recruiting is just one. The interesting point is that this appears to have tripled the number of r233。s received and has, at the same time, increased the quality of applicants. What the pany has also done is acknowledge that employees need to be encouraged to use the Inter themselves to recruit and appoint new employees and thus rewards are given for those who make an offer via the Inter. Speed of response and increased numbers of applicants: What this Workforce article highlighted was the need for organizations to manage the shortened recruitment cycle that online recruiting brings. Some panies manage the 6 increased speed of response and the increased numbers by improving internal capabilities in terms of software, technology and dedicated resources, such as American Express. Lockheed Martin Technology Services Group has done something slightly different at Not only has it appointed an inhouse interactive recruitment specialist, it has also developed a Company Web page for personnel involved in recruiting which links them into further pages and sites related to job fairs and other recruitment interests. Outsourcing the management of the online recruitment process is also a mon practice, and the advice from all sources seems to be: Do so if