We are living in the computer age and organizations are beginning to increasingly depend on the Internet for all types of business activities including online recruitment of candidates – more popularly referred to as E-recruitment. The human resources departments are taking advantage of the advancing technology and deploying web-based tools for inviting and comparing resumes.
Many business enterprises are using Internet as a source of recruitment. They advertise job vacancies through the worldwide web. Quite often, the job seekers also place their curriculum vitae (CV) on the various job sites where prospective employers may pick them for a personal interview.
It is reliably reported that over 18 million resumes are currently available online across the world and this figure is steadily increasing.
E-recruitment Methods
E-recruitments are generally done in two different ways:
- Post the company profile and the job specifications on one of the many available job portals and also search the portal to see if any suitable resumes are on the site.
- The alternate is to create an online recruitment page on the company’s own website where job seekers can submit their resumes which will get added to the database of the organization for future consideration.
Many organizations post the job vacancies on the site as this is vastly cheaper than advertising in the daily newspapers. Besides, e-recruitment helps the companies to automate the entire recruitment process, saving both time and expenses. It will be useful if a well-conceived and imaginatively structured applicant tracking method is developed and integrated with back-end support.
Trends in E-recruitment
The latest innovation is the Resume Scanner that most job portals offer the companies to help them screen and shortlist the resumes as per candidates, qualifications and experience, special skills and salary details.
There is ample evidence that business enterprises are increasingly using Internet technology as well as the World Wide Web as a platform for recruiting candidates. A recent survey of more than 50 organizations using e-recruitment methods reported the reasons for the switch-over from traditional methods to e-recruitment:
- Web presence and using Internet improve corporate image
- Minimizes recruitment costs
- Lessens paper work and administrative burden
- Ability to deploy advanced web tools for the recruitment team.
The employer must learn to reach job aspirants by creating profiles on social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn and can also advertise job vacancies with the numerous online recruitment agencies – to intensify the talent hunt.
E-recruitment Benefits
The benefits of e-recruitment are many and few of them are listed below:
- Cost-effective: Placing job advertisements on the Internet is a lot cheaper than newspaper, magazines and other media.
- Saves time: Delivery time and response time are immediate unlike the earlier postal mail or fax messaging that was time-consuming.
- Broadens the search: Has global reach 24×7 almost instantly and this is indeed a huge advantage.
- Greater clarity: Press insertions have word limits and that could lead to unclear messages. On the internet there is no word limitation and all relevant details can be expressed unambiguously.
- Better standardization: The information from all the candidates can be obtained in standard uniform format to facilitate easy comparison.
- Minimizes paper work: Gathering and compilation of data, filing of records and all related administrative work done electronically and thus, time-consuming paperwork is considerably lessened.
The prospective candidates can visit the company sites, post resume and expect responses through e-mails. E-recruitment is also a tool for many employers to search for talented candidates looking for jobs. Human resource management is becoming more and more critical and not only acquiring but also retaining the employees is the biggest challenge for many organizations. So, recruitment processes must aim at creating a vast pool of potential candidates and for this the use of Internet and e-recruitment methods have paved the way.