Competitive strategy for electronic recruitment and its benefits

The use of Internet recruiting has increased dramatically in the last five years. A telescopic view of online recruiting is that everywhere you look and everything you see highlights some sort of website address. Whether you’re ordering food, looking for a good book, banking, or shopping for insurance, it can all be done from the comfort of home via the World Wide Web. It’s certainly no secret that people have been and continue to flock to the Internet in droves. According to Pew Internet, 70% of the US population is now online, 50% of whom have high-speed Internet access. What does this mean for online recruiting? It means you can get your job ad recruiting message out to qualified potential candidates faster and easier than ever before and from an employee perspective you can apply for a job anywhere in the world just by sitting in front of a computer and clicking the mouse. Here’s a brief history of monster.com more than doubling its revenue from job postings in 2001, while newspapers reported a 17% decline.

In 2000, classified advertising in employment newspapers in the US was worth $8.7 billion, the Newspaper Association of America’s preliminary statistic for 2002 is $4.3 billion. The purpose of E-Recruiting is to attract the potential pool of applicants for your open position. To attract potential candidates, the organization must adopt the following strategies.

1. The organization’s own website that can be used for recruiting purposes. It is much better for a company to have a separate site for their recruitment and selection purposes.

2. Monster.com. CareerBuilder.com. Listing periodicals on at least one of these sites is essential as an anchor for an online publishing strategy. But to be on the safer side, the company needs to focus on its own website.

3. A solid database must be created to avoid resume overload. Solutions to managing resume overload usually involve throwing resources at the problem. You can hire a recruiter to do the work for you, or install some form or applicant tracking system to help automate it. But if you can’t justify installing a system and don’t want to pay for a Recruiter, you’ll end up dealing with resume overload at hand and that method is to use a questionnaire that the applicant will fill out when applying for the position. Recruiters can tailor online questionnaires to detect required skills, to meet the exact needs of a company, position, or application.

4. Assess your recruiting needs, then have an overview of your allocated budget, and then purchase an applicant tracking system through decentralized decision. Many companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to find top job seekers faster and improve hiring efficiency. But many of these systems don’t accurately track which job boards are sending quality candidates to their clients, says the world’s largest alliance of employment websites, Nicheboards.com. Companies that rely on candidate search reports that are often hopelessly inaccurate can make online recruiting decisions that end up reducing the number of quality candidates they actually receive.

5. Each site attracts a different audience, and companies that diversify their Internet recruiting strategies have achieved higher levels of recruiting success. The best practice is to incorporate a mix of sites. Because relying on a single web source could not attract a pool of applicants. Therefore, companies need to post their open vacancies on their own recruitment site, national sites, industry-specific sites, and regional sites for effective e-recruitment.

Here are five reasons why it’s wise for organizations to put a lot of emphasis on their own careers website.

1. The effective use of a job website is a low-cost alternative to traditional recruitment strategies for both organizations and applicants.

2. Job boards generally provide job-relevant information in a generic format that does not document the unique qualities of an organization.

3. An organization’s career page provides a first impression to potential applicants, which is important to those applicants’ intentions to land a job.

4. Through a corporate website you can present information that highlights unique aspects of the corporate culture that can attract people who would be a particularly good fit within the organization.

5. Organizations may allow individuals to apply online within the website using features designed specifically for the needs of the organization.

Changing Era of Electronic Recruitment

Now the world of recruitment is changing, companies try to hire an employee by recommendation. Nortel Networks, the world’s second-largest maker of network equipment, has upped the ante in the war for talent: It’s offering $1 million in cash and prizes to employees who attract qualified contacts to join the company. And Nortel is not alone. PeopleSoft has begun paying $5,000 in tax-free structured search fees to employees who are referred by marketing managers, and BabyCenter.com is offering a $2,000 bonus and a bottle of expensive champagne to its employees who refer new hires. Today, savvy recruiters are taking advantage of the resources of an increasing number of Web-based employee referral systems. Take Referrals.com, the latest entrant in the war for your recruiting dollar. The recruiting startup offers a targeted approach to engaging a company’s top performers to connect with a handful of other professionals whose work they respect in exchange for referral bonuses that result in hires. If a hire is made, the online company gets 20 percent of the referral bonus as a fee.

Online recruiting dramatically increases an organization’s exposure to applicants at a fraction of the cost of traditional job advertising methods. The average cost of hiring for US companies has been reported to be between $8,000 and $10,000 per applicant, depending on the type of employee selected. In stark contrast, the cost of attraction through online recruiting has been reported to be as low as $900 per applicant. In addition to financial cost savings, online recruiting also provides considerable time savings. It has been estimated that the amount of time spent in the recruitment and selection cycle will decrease by as much as 25 percent.

From the applicant’s perspective, the opportunity cost of looking for a job drops dramatically on the Internet. Job information can be obtained quickly and easily online. Some organizations have job databases that include descriptions of hundreds of jobs. The online job application usually requires little more than filling out a few lines of personal information and clicking the submit button. Instead of physically traveling to different organizations to pick up application materials, online job seekers can search and apply for jobs in geographically dispersed locations without leaving their desk. This time savings can be especially beneficial for recruiting passive job seekers. Unlike active applicants who are explicitly motivated to find work, passive applicants are often employed individuals who are willing to explore potential job opportunities that may be available. Passive applicants are the type of job applicants that organizations value highly when the job market is tight. The Internet has revolutionized the ability of passive job seekers to find new job opportunities and for organizations to approach passive job seekers in less intrusive ways.

Organizations can tap into unique aspects of their culture through the information they present on their website. Much more information can be communicated through a company’s website than has been possible with traditional recruitment materials (for example, newspaper ads or brochures). A key advantage of providing so much detail allows an applicant to make a more informed assessment of their suitability for an organization. This has both short- and long-term advantages for an organization. In the short term, people who do not feel they will fit into an organizational culture will be excluded from employment considerations, thus saving time and HR effort. In the long run, people who fit within an organizational culture are more likely to be long-term, productive members of an organization. This provides benefits for both applicants and recruiters.