Recruiting workflow

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Discussion

In this section we contextualise our research within strategic HR-sourcing and service-science and design science literature. In order to create business value, the IT-services we have described – and a service orientation in the HR function – need to be embraced by HR practitioners. The success of the portal project has offered a number of insights into the ways in which IT-based services translate into improved business processes and a mutually beneficial exchange between job-seekers and organizations. This is enabled by the technology, but does not happen automatically; it requires a perspective shift by recruiters. For example, rather than seeing the long life of digital resumes as a disadvantage of digital recruiting, if more attention is paid to service-oriented resume design as we describe, it can add value for both parties. Properly managed, e-HRM services can transition recruiting from a “deal” between applicant and organization based around a specific position, to a “relationship” between individuals and organizations, based on ongoing communication and negotiation about person-position fit.

Digital recruiting services make it easy for applicants to send their resumes but become rapidly outdated. It is frustrating for recruiters to identify perfect candidates with active-appearing resumes who are nonresponsive due to changed circumstances in their career status (Feldman & Klaas, 2002; Lin & Stasinskaya, 2002). When recruiters receive print resumes, after an initial screening they reply with a rejection or an invitation to submit more documents for additional screening or an invitation for an interview or further testing. In the offline context, the applicant is usually removed from the pool of applications except the organization keeps resumes stored for later possible jobs interviews. In contrast, in the digital context, resumes can be stored lifelong. This offers the potential for a dialogue with candidates of potential interest to the organisation.

In order to achieve this, various career states should be recorded to the applicant to indicate if they are willing to interview at a certain time (e.g. available on, currently not available, latent jobs seeker i.e. open for job offers however currently in a job). This example demonstrates the importance of the interaction of technology, organisations, and applicants in co-creating value (Grönroos & Ravald, 2011). The technology offers persistent data, the ability to record career state, and searchability, but both organisations and applicants must move from a “deal-oriented” view of job seeking to a “relationship-oriented” view for this innovation to add value for them.

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A service-oriented approach can allow recruiters to deliver value for candidates by offering services that build trust. A recent innovation is the creation of private (for applicants and friends of applicants and public (for HR recruiters) spaces of the applicant profile. This allows to e-Recruiting services to enable social network functionality among registered users (Brown & Vaughn, 2011). This functionality fosters engagement, builds trust, and wards off the fear that personalized resume data will be misused.

As we mentioned earlier, the engagement of the practitioner community in

“crowdsourcing” the maintenance and extension of the ontology (standardized vocabulary)

for e-HRM has been critical to its success. As reported by other researchers (Malinkowski et al., 2006), a major challenge for effective recruiting is to establish a standardized vocabulary for resume and job ad content. Our research clearly revealed that online resume forms use many different synonyms for the same resume field. For instance, some career services ask applicants to fill in their earliest possible working start date, others the earliest beginning date or job enter date – terms which all relate to the same construct. Some information services request applicants to fill in exact day of the month whereas others require filling in ‘start month’ and year. The development of an adaptive skills ontology reflecting applicants’ various hard skills such as computer or language skills was challenging (Weitzel et al., 2009), yet systematically structuring soft, social and leadership skills to enable effective pre- screening of resumes was even more challenging. Skill ontologies for the HR domain require ongoing adjustments by their user community to organizational and regional needs.

This study offers an early example of a successful large scale service engineering project. Since the project pre-dated emerging research literature on service engineering methodologies, we relied on previous knowledge of software engineering, reflective practice, and continuous evaluation to inform our approach. The life-cycle we followed also constitutes a research contribution.

Although conceptual methods are beginning to emerge in the literature, relatively few have been trialed in large-scale projects. We refer to the conceptual model of service engineering previously presented. Our experience suggests that effective service design and deployment requires a multi-disciplinary approach that “slices” each layer. This presents a number of challenges as each layer has its own research literature, specialized skill-set and vocabularies. Leadership which can traverse and integrate the contributions required from each layer is essential, and will likely require a new generation of service managers with an understanding of how to integrate business and IT contributions.

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We have presented a version of this conceptual model as a high-level methodology (Figure 2). The convergence between our effective practice and the emerging research literature gives confidence in both the rigour of our methods, and provides some empirical evidence in support of the emerging theoretical models. We also note that especially in the early stages, there is some similarity with existing software development methodologies. In our view, service-oriented engineering and software engineering diverge most in what we have described as the maintenance and extension phase and the embedding and governance phase. Traditional information systems can be seen as a punctuated equilibrium – a version of the system is designed and implemented, and then remains static until the next round of

“enhancements”.

Service oriented technologies, by contrast, should be designed to be inherently learning and adaptive to their environment. The ontology, supported by the classifier and workflow that we have presented are dynamically extensible; can add new skills; and can facilitate negotiation and dialogue between applicants and recruiters without requiring a system enhancement – these capabilities are in-built. Similarly, the embedding and governance phase is a major point of departure from traditional systems development. Service oriented IT systems are not “implemented” in the traditional sense. They are either appropriated and/or embedded in their community (in which case they are successful), or they are not.

Without continuous extension arising from use by applicants and recruiters, and the ability to crowdsource knowledge about new jobs, skills, qualifications, and other categories in the ontology, our solutions could not create value. The on-going management and governance is distributed into the user community.

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