E-Recruitment – Advantages & Pitfalls

Published: June 2002 - www.netcheck.co.nz 

How do online methods of recruitment work compare with traditional manual processes?

What are the advantages to employers, and does e-recruitment have any pitfalls?

Online recruitment can be extremely cost effective in comparison with traditional print-based advertising campaigns. Advertisers are able to build a sophisticated profile on their own organisation and describe roles in-depth, for a minimal amount of money.

For companies utilising their own website it can provide an opportunity to streamline their own recruitment process by linking to an on-line advertising site.

Internet advertising itself, allows advertisers tremendous flexibility in the style of advertising – the facility to build templates, edit, delete and archive positions almost instantaneously. Traditional more print-focused advertising is slower and less flexible.

Today, as a recruitment consultancy, we don’t go through the process of questioning whether we place a role on the internet. We decide which internet site is going to produce the most suited response.

Online advertising speeds up the recruitment response process dramatically. Job seekers and employers are able to search more effectively and efficiently for matches to requirements. We can further define suitability of response to our vacancies with tools that build psychological profiles, and qualify response in more detail by asking a series of questions.

The ease of accessibility to the internet can be a tremendous bonus, but the huge volumes of response can have a major impact. It is very important that advertisers have mechanisms in place to deal with response. Not acknowledging response within a reasonable period of time is a sure way to lose credibility for an organisation.

So frequently in recruitment there is a compromise on the harder skills in favour of the soft skills. “Hire for Attitude, Train for Skills” is widely acknowledged among employers. There is a danger with e-recruitment that potential candidates who may have the softer skills are screened out. This is less of a danger with more traditional methods of recruitment where response is dealt with at a personal level earlier in the recruitment process, and a great cultural fit can be traded with some shortfalls in the technical side.

Online recruitment is the expectation in IT, but combining the advantages of e-recruitment with a human element is important so that people are not numbers being run through a totally automated process.