E-RECRUITMENT - BLOG 02

Advantages and Challenges in E-Recruitment 

Earlier companies found it difficult to fill the new openings due to the competitive market and due to difficulty in making awareness of such availability. While newspapers may have been the most traditional job seeking source, the internet has now taken over in the last couple of years. 

(Source: dgtalworld, 2017)

In a very competitive and difficult corporate time like this, many companies are seeking to cut down costs and increase the margins. In order to reduce the cost of recruitment, companies have turned up online recruitment as their first option to make awareness of such openings and fill those immediately.  The first decade of the twenty-first century showed a rapid growth in the use of online recruitment and organizational transformation into technological advancement (Holm, 2010).

Applying and advertising for openings gives job seekers as well as the organizations, number of advantages. However, this recruitment method has also shown drawbacks.

1. Advantages of E-Recruitment

1.1 Online recruitment is cost effective.

Putting a job vacancy in your own organization website will cost nothing and even due to the competition within the online job market, the cost of advertising has gone down. When you consider the cost for advertising in a national newspaper, you can immediately choose what's best for the company. Moreover, online recruitment has shown more positive hiring compared to post hiring done by the organizations (Taylor, 1994).

1.2 Online recruitment is quick.

A job vacancy can be advertised to the job site any time of desire, and by the following day, there will be loads of applications. As there will be a large number of audience the organization can thereby determine who's ideal for the job and who's not. Lots of organizations are saving so many resources due to this effective method of e-recruitment. With this, the communication with candidates will be meaningful instead of talking over the phone or in person, which will eventually save a lot of time.

2. Challenges of E-Recruitment

2.1 Lack Of Personal Touch

If the company is looking for the most talented to recruit, this method will definitely fail. Since there is no human contact and no discussions are done. And in a case where the recruiting service does not have a proper arranging and access to the applications, those applications can go out of date and eventually outdated by the time of interview call. The internet increases the quantity of the talent pool, but not necessarily the quality, and the perception remains that it is a suitable medium only for IT and graduate jobs while excluding older applicants and minority groups (Hinton, 2003). 

2.2 Large Number of Response

(Source: Dreamstime, n.d.)

(Source: employer.londonmet.prospects, n.d.)

A job seeker can basically apply for any opening available in the respective website. And there are no restrictions whatsoever. Therefore the company will have to spend a lot of time to wade each ineligible applicant. Also, a right person to an available job might get a little late to submit the application meanwhile the fresher gets the job since he/she already applied and got the job. 

However, it's the company's responsibility to be as specific as possible to describe the available job, duties and the qualification needed in the advertisement. 

CONCLUSION

Moreover, this method of recruiting is done on a larger scale as people nowadays find it difficult to go through newspapers with their busy schedules. The methods of E-Recruitments needs to be specific and has to be there for the betterment of both employer and employee's but the traditional method should not be replaced by the online recruitment system, it should be a supplement (Ramaabaanu & Saranya, 2014). In E-Recruitment, advantages attributed that cost-effectiveness, speed, ease of access while disadvantages as lack of personal touch, a high number of applicants and security problems (Feldman & Klass, 2002).




References,

Hinton. S, 2003. ‘The Rhetoric and Reality of E-recruitment: Has the Internet really Revolutionised the Recruitment Process. In Weisner, R & Millett, B (eds) Human Resource Management: Challenges & Future Directions, Milton Qld: Wiley pp 187-194

Holm, A. B, 2010. The Effect of E-recruitment on the Recruitment Process: Evidence from Case Studies of Three Danish MNCs. Third European Academic Workshop on electronic Human Resource Management (pp. 91-111). Bamberg, Germany: CEUR-WS.org.

Taylor, G.S. 1994. The Relationship Between Source of New Employees and Attitudes Towards the Job. The Journal Of Social Psychology, 134(1): 99-110.

Ramaabaanu, R. & Saranya, M. 2014. Importance and Problems of E-Recruitment.

Felderman, C.D. & Klass, B.S. 2002. Internet Job Hunting: A Field Study of Applicant Experiences with On-line Recruiting. Human Resource Management, 41(2): 175-192.

- Thimira Wijekoon