Challenges of online recruitment from an employers’ perspective

An organization on adapting online recruitment can be benefited to a great extent. However, there are certainly few challenges associated with their successful implementation. According to Khosrowpour (2007), there are four major challenges by name managerial, organizational, technological and legal challenges that have to overcome by organizations for making the best use of online recruitment process. The four major challenges to be overcome by organization in implementing online recruitment successful as defined by Harvey, Blakely and Lee (2002),  are listed below:

Managerial challenges

The managerial challenges are listed as follows:

• Any technology would remain unused without user acceptance. It is important that hiring and recruiting managers are knowledgeable and comfortable about the use of online recruiting methods. Organizations must hence conduct a comprehensive training program for HR managers to help them use the online recruitment tool without any difficulty.
• The usage online recruitment method has not put an end to the use of other recruitment methods such as employee referrals, newspaper ads, etc. Given the limited financial resources, finding the optimal mix of various recruitment methods is a challenge for human resource managers.
• The success of online recruitment does not rely purely upon the technical sophistication of the career website, but upon balanced combination of management skills and technology. With several available choices, recruiters must initiate to learn the ways to combine technology into the recruitment practices to improve strategies and increase their efficiencies.
• Finally, online recruitment has helped companies to retrieve and store talented applicants faster, but always failed to screen the applicants sufficiently. Therefore hiring and recruiting managers have to review each of the applications manually before interviewing a candidate and performing an assessment.

Organizational challenges

The organizational challenges include:

• Most qualified applicants are often passive job seekers, who are presently employed but may be interested in new job opportunities. A strategy to recognize passive job seekers and motivate them to apply must be developed;
• Business process redesign is needed across the whole process of human resource management to realize the online recruitment benefits (Taylor, 2005). Inefficient and bottleneck tasks must be identified and reconfigured, so that the whole process of recruitment moves quickly with an exchange of standardized data; and
• It is critical to benchmark the best management practice and develop a set of metrics that measure the effectiveness of various methods of recruitment. There are no important statistics available at present on the effectiveness of different management practices and online recruitment tools because of a limited experience with online recruitment.

Technical challenges

The technical challenges include:

• Lack of confidentiality and security of information discourages the posting of job applications by job seekers. While security is one of the biggest challenges with job applicants, topmost companies do not specify it explicitly on the career website
• Combining the process of online recruitment with processes of conventional recruitment is critical due to limited availability of software resources. Paper based resumes must be converted into a digitized form and stored in the database and
• Designing a career database is a complete task. The databases of job must be designed to minimize redundant data and optimize the performance of job search by a candidate. This can be done by understanding the recruiters and applicants search behavior.

Legal challenges

The legal challenges include:

• There is a need for employer liability for not violating employment discrimination laws and the laws are similar to applicant background checks and laws restricting false advertising. A comprehensive guideline for applicant data collection must be developed in consultation with legal professionals;
• Various reporting needs for government would be for global companies for centralized recruiting (Flynn, 2002) and
• Online recruitment is likely to affect the diversity of an organization if proper efforts are not made. Web users are nonminority, computer savvy, young people who are typically well educated. These biased demographic characteristics can create a serious impact on diversity thereby giving candidates belonging to minority group less chance to be hired than others.

References:

• Khosrowpour M (2007), “ Utilizing and manage commerce and services online”, Cybertech Publishing, USA.
• Harvey E B, Blakely J H and Lee K A (2002), Internet Solution for HR Managers, CCH Canadian Limited, Canada, p 91-92.
• Taylor S (2005), People Resourcing, CIPD Publishing, London, p 176.