What is E-Recruitment and why is it needed?
Recruitment involves advertising a position, attracting candidates to apply for the position, screening the candidates and ultimately selecting one of the screened candidates to fulfill the position. Organizations may choose to utilize recruiters in-house, have an external agency do their recruiting or take a hybrid approach where an external agency will send pre-screened applicants to an in-house recruiter. The decision of how an organization would conduct its recruitment process would be based on a number of factors such as:
- Financial Resources
- Time constraints
- Number of positions which need to be filled
- Number of applicants that apply for a position
- Seniority of the position
Although recruitment is integral to the success of a corporation, traditional recruitment was prone to a variety of issues which included:
- Escalating costs of advertising job positions
- Difficulties in screening out unqualified candidates
- Having enough qualified candidates apply for positions
However once again technology intervened and has helped make the recruitment process much easier to manage thanks to E-recruitment. E-recruitment is similar to traditional recruiting as the goals are still to advertise a need in an organization, attract candidates, screen them and then select the appropriate candidate(s). The difference is that with E-recruiting this process takes place online. E-recruitment has evolved to the point where employers are now advertising jobs, accepting resumes, using tools to screen resumes and even conducting interviews completely online. The benefits of E-recruitment include:
- Costs: Many websites will allow organizations to post job listings online for free
- Attracting more applicants: Organizations can leverage online tools such as LinkedIn to attract more candidates
- Screening Employees: Recruitment software allows organizations to capture incoming resumes and match them against pre-defined criteria so that HR professionals do not have to spend their time reading unqualified resumes
- Interviewing: Using webcams and the internet organizations can easily meet with candidates that may be located in another geographical region at minimal cost
