Oikotie, SanomaWSOY’s online service that specialises in car, housing and employment advertisements, has recently launched its new recruitment management service, Oikotie RH. “We bring our operations deeper into our customers’ value chain”, describes Director Jukka Haapalainen the new service offered by Oikotie.
Oikotie RH is an electronic recruitment management tool that releases human resources from the routines of the recruitment process.
“Organizations will have increased recruitment requirements in the future. In Finland, we are facing the retirement of the baby boomer generation, about one million people, meaning about the same number of new recruitments”, Jukka Haapalainen explains the reason of the extended service concept.
“The mobility of labour is increasing in pace with temporary jobs, and recruitment practices need to change accordingly. Business as a whole demands an ability to react more swiftly, and recruitment practices will also need to be more efficient”, Haapalainen says.
Director Jukka Haapalainen.
Electronic routines, lower costs
“Our market research showed that only few companies use electronic recruitment systems although they have electronic payroll and human resources management systems”, mentions Kati Tötterman, responsible for the employment advertising operations of Oikotie .
“Electronic job application forms are published and answered electronically on companies’ websites, but instead of being processed electronically they are printed and filed in folders”, she says.
Jukka Haapalainen has calculated the costs: “The conventional routine processing of one employment application takes 40 minutes. With an electronic system, the same routine will take just two minutes. In terms of money, the cost saving can be as much as 20 euros per application.”
“Thanks to an electronic system, you can achieve more with the same resources. Less manual labour will leave more time for evaluation and planning. The process can be accelerated, which will boost the image of a modern employer”, Haapalainen lists the benefits of the system.
Changed recruitment logic
Companies today often publish their recruitment ads first on their own websites and only after that in external advertising media.
Particularly major employers with a good employer image are successful recruiters through their own websites. Jukka Haapalainen anticipates that once the economy starts recovering and recruitment requirements increase, the use of online portals and newspaper advertising will again start growing. However, he does not believe that the volume of press advertising seen in the past boom years would return. Internet channels have radically changed the recruitment logic.
Oikotie – biggest and best-know n
Oikotie has been operating one year in its present form. Its customer base includes all major real estate agents, about 130 car dealers and all significant employers. The results of customer satisfaction surveys are excellent and the technology has functioned well. The numbers of visitors have grown 100 per cent during the year: today, Oikotie has 275,000 – 280,000 visitors each month.
“Our primary goal is to be profitable. We also want to be the market leader in all the segments of our trade”, says Jukka Haapalainen.
Oikotie today is the leading and best-known online service for classified and recruitment advertisements. In housing and car advertising it is the number two.
Oikotie’s business is based on cooperation with seven leading Finnish daily papers, such as Helsingin Sanomat and Kymen Sanomat. Oikotie is visible on the pages of these papers and reaches two million Finnish readers every day.
Text: Eevu Heikura