Companies which embrace e-recruitment techniques must adopt the principles of 'Web 2.0' to stay ahead of the field — that was the overriding message presented last week at the 'Online Recruitment 2007 — the year ahead' conference in London.

The expression 'Web 2.0' refers to technological tools used to communicate information on the web, such as networking facilities, blogs, pod casts, video, Google Wordads and RSS (Really Simple Syndication). It also refers to collective intelligence.

Is your website harnessing collective intelligence? asked Dave Reilly, managing director of search marketing agency Barracuda Digital. Reilly was one of nine speakers at the one-day event which attracted HR, marketing and recruitment professionals.

The way people use the internet is changing — broadband is playing a big part in that, explained Alastair Cartwright, commercial director of the conference's organiser, Enhance Media. "An example of this is RSS. It will soon replace email. Email is unreliable because of the amount of spam people receive."

He also emphasised that online is a serious player in advertising, making up 10% of all advertising spend in the UK, and securing £917.2m in the first half of 2006. "Online is driving the whole market," Cartwright said.

Other speakers warned the audience to use online judiciously. Jason Gorham of US-based CareerMetaSearch.com provoked considerable debate by his claim that generalist job boards are not as effective as the niche sites in filling job vacancies (31 January, www.recruiter.co.uk). Additionally, he said, "saturation [of the job board market] has driven costs up." (See feature, p34.) Recruiters using job boards must move toward paying for performance, he urged. "Return on investment is all that matters."

Gorham also shared Web 2.0 concepts for targeting specific groups of consumers on the internet which recruiters are adapting to target passive candidates. Behavioural targeting, based on a user's behaviour on a website, and internet protocol targeting, which can fix a recruiter's sights on candidates from a specific company, are two such tools that received a mixed reception from the audience.

Isn't that a little aggressive? asked an audience member.

I think that's an internal struggle, Gorham responded.

Other speakers included Gautam Godhwani of US jobs search engine Simplyhired.com, Dave Smith of CareerBuilder.co.uk, Peter Altieri of RecruiTV/Wetjello and Toni Williams of Serco.