Benefits of online recruitment

By on February 13, 2012

Online recruitment has transformed the recruitment landscape. Its impact has already yielded unparalleled amounts of cost and time savings. One advantage of this scheme is that it easily reaches the right audience and trims it down to get only the qualified applicants. E-recruitment has various tools to broaden the scope of the search then identify and classify the almost unlimited number of job seekers bringing back the set of high-qualified candidates. Literature says that most applicants that utilize online recruitment are better educated, more computer literate, young and show interest for the company (Bunting, 2007). Aside from this, online recruitment has also given the organizations many choices from an extremely large number of links where they can post their vacancies. These posts are also equivalent to a worldwide advertisement unlike a newspaper that reaches only a local level. Online recruitment has its own benefits. Compared to print media it has a longer span of life and economical. It gets wide responses as it is very simple for the applicants to respond to online ads. These factors have led to the increasing popularity of online recruiting. Big companies and Information technology companies have their own dedicated sections of recruitment on their websites to attract prospective applicants to apply for jobs in their organizations while others use the professional jobs services. The benefits of online recruitment are two-fold. It could be viewed from an employers’ perspective as well as benefits from an applicants’ perspective. It can be explained as follows:

Benefits from an employers’ perspective

Online recruitment provides a great advantage for both the organizations and the job seekers. Studies show that it impacts greatly on the efficiency, cost and simplicity of application. Online recruitment fits the genre organizations have today. In this way, more competitive and highly qualified and deserving workers would be seen and utilized for the betterment of the organization. Businesses are no longer defining online recruitment as an external board of job to which they can post ads of job. Instead, they are viewing the online recruitment internalization as an individual process that enhances recruitment, workforce planning and hiring (Cooper, Robertson and Tinline, 2003) argue that online recruitment besides saving cost also help organizations to offer more information to applicants, which could be updated then and there. There is more scope to present the “employment preposition” in terms that increase the attractiveness of the company as a place in which to work (Reynolds and Weiner, 2009).  Online recruitment offers several benefits to employers. If many people already use the Internet to find jobs, many companies, on the other hand, use this as a source of recruitment. This is the latest trend in the human resource industry. This type of recruitment helps the companies to accomplish the recruitment processes and even maintain their quality employees with minimum supervision and resources. Online recruitment has such a profound effect on businesses in general that global mammoths such as Hewlett, Dell, Cisco and Packard systems have initiated to change their human resource systems to facilitate online recruitment. Online recruitment could be done through online screening, self-assessment, and online psychometric test.

According to Cushway (2011, p 16), online recruitment can improve the efficiency of the recruitment process of an organization by lowering down the number of people involved in recruiting a candidate and increasing the speed of the process of recruitment. Online recruitment promotes company’s image and projects it as an up-to-date and modern employer. Online recruitment is available 24 X 7 and makes it easier for the candidates to apply for a job. Online recruitment helps employers in effectively carrying out their internal recruitment process. Mondy (2008) argue that prior to the use of online recruitment, organizations found it difficult to notify their employees about vacancies of job within an organization since the information was not easily accessible by them. (Othman & Musa, 2007) argue that, with online recruitment, the process of internal as well as external recruitment has become easy for organizations. Online recruitment improves the efficiency of the whole recruitment process of a company. It can be observed from the great time reduction of recruitment. This is because there are no intermediaries present, the résumés can be accessed anytime and any day, and the unqualified applicants are sorted out fast in an automated way.

Online recruitment potentially lowers down the cost and has the ability to concentrate on a particular target pool of applicants. Online recruitment saves paperwork and helps organizations to store large amount of information for a long time without any loss. Online recruitment collects huge databank of applications and help employers in processing them easily. It also has the ability to advertise vacancies extensively such that they reach job seekers residing all over the globe. Finally, online recruitment supports the organizations to remove the unqualified employees in an automated way thereby saving the time they take for processing the applications.

Benefits from a job seekers’ perspective

A job seeker can search a job that is available anywhere in the world through an online recruitment medium (Mathis and Jackson, 2010). Online recruitment portals offer huge amount of information about a job and a company to the applicants. This helps them in applying a company or job of their choice. Another major benefit is the ease and speed with which the job seekers can respond when they view an opportunity publicized on online. It can take seconds and small clicks of a mouse to send curriculum vitae through email to the concerned employer (Brady, 2007). The next benefit is that online recruitment helps job seekers to apply for several jobs posted by several employers within no time. Finally online recruitment saves, cost as well as time to job seekers. The applicants need not spend huge dollars in sending the application to an employer. Instead, they can send any number of applications at no cost to any number of employers. This helps them save huge amount of money.  The accuracy and ease of use, provides more encouragement to highly qualified candidates into using this method. The combination of the organization’s needs and the wants of the applicant is what the online recruiting serves. It is simple, interactive, fast, organized and cheap.

Conclusion

Online recruitment is the utilization of the Internet for the recruitment process by advertising in corporate websites or in web-based job sites. Aside from posting jobs, organizations through online recruitment could also electronically contact a prospective applicant by browsing resume.Online recruitment helps organizations carry out entire process of recruitment without incurring much expenditure and within no time. This means everything from posting a vacancy to receiving the CV’s by email to sending offers to right candidates could be done online.  The major advantage cited for the successful and wide adoption of online recruitment methods include efficiency, cost savings and convenience for both job seekers and recruiters.Thus it can be concluded that online recruitment, helps both employers as well as job seekers to save time, energy and cost in attaining their goals of hiring and being hired, respectively.

References

  • Dominic Cooper, Ivan T. Robertson, Gordon Tinline (2003), “Recruitment and selection: a framework for success”, Thomson Learning, London, p 85.
  • Reynolds D H and Weiner J A (2009), Online Recruiting and Selection: Innovations in Talent Acquisition, Blackwell Publishing, UK.
  • Cushway B (2011), “The Employer’s Handbook 2011-12: An Essential Guide to Employment Law, Personnel Policies and Procedures”, Kogan Page, UK, pp 15-16.
  • Mondy R W (2009), Human Resource Management, Dorling Kindersley, New Delhi, p 98
  • Brady R L (2007), Win the recruiting war!: finding and hiring great employees, Business and Legal Reports Inc., USA, p 13-14
  • Mathis R L and Jackson J H (2010), Human Resource Management, Cengage Learning, USA, p 189
  • Bunting S (2007), The Interviewer’s Handbook: Successful Interviewing Techniques for the Workplace, Kogan Page, USA, p 97.

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