The widespread advent of online recruitment has ushered in a brave new world for jobseekers and employers alike, rife with myriad benefits and rewards. Some of these advantages are obvious, while others, though more subtle, are no less significant.
The most immediately apparent benefit of online recruitment is the vastly improved degree of recruitment process management this approach offers. Throughout every phase of the recruitment process, an online system facilitates a much more streamlined, standardized approach than traditional, paper-based recruitment. Many once-manual tasks, such as sorting, coding, filing, and routing application materials, can now be performed automatically. Some experts estimate that the average recruitment cycle is one-third to one-half as long as it was in the pre-Internet era.
This enhanced process efficiency contributes significantly to another major benefit of online recruitment -- its cost-effectiveness. Although the costs of developing and implementing a full-scale recruitment system on a firm's corporate web site are often not inconsiderable, recent studies and industry surveys indicate that most firms' recruitment costs have decreased sharply after the shift toward online systems.
Some leading-edge online recruitment tools hold the promise of extending the efficiency of this approach even further. Applications like qualification quizzes, instant 'fit' assessments, skill-based evaluations, and other metrics can be administered instantly to candidates over the Internet, thus further winnowing down the number of résumés that must be hand-coded by HR personnel. Although not yet widely used, industry experts see this trend as an important component of online recruitment's future.
Conversely, even as new and emerging tools can help firms weed out unsuitable applicants automatically, the shift toward online recruitment has also improved the 21st century job search by allowing employers to cast the broadest net possible in the search for qualified candidates. By using the Internet as a recruitment platform, companies have eliminated many of the geographical, cultural, and time-zone constraints that once narrowed the candidate pool. This benefit is particularly well-suited to today's workplace, in which team diversity is appreciated as a way to gain competitive advantage in the global marketplace.
Experts have also noted that when properly managed, online recruitment's positive impact can transcend the realm of HR and enhance the firm in other ways, as well. In an era in which image is everything, online recruitment can form an important component of an overarching brand management strategy. Whether or not a candidate opts to apply for an open position, the marketing collateral that's packed into a carefully-crafted online job posting can help enhance brand awareness, an intangible but vital variable in today's cut-throat competitive landscape.
The Disadvantages of Online Recruitment
Despite the rich promise inherent in the practice of online recruitment, there are potential drawbacks, as well. Although many of the current concerns will likely be able to be overcome through future advancements in the technology, they still merit serious consideration.
In the early days of online recruitment, many expressed concern that qualified applicants may be overlooked by recruiters focusing primarily on candidates who submitted online applications. Initially, this point was valid, as most of the jobseekers who were "early adopters" of online recruitment were a self-selecting group of college-educated, computer literature, and, for the most part, demographically homogenous individuals.
However, Internet use among the general public has skyrocketed over the last five years. Virtually every demographic group has an online presence, making it likely that the right candidates will find a way to connect with the right position. In addition, most companies continue to maintain traditional application channels to accommodate the needs of offline jobseekers.
Conversely, while some experts fear that the growing popularity of online recruitment may exclude too many potential applicants, others fear that online application methods aren't exclusive enough. Now that virtually anyone can submit an application with just a few clicks of the mouse, the traditional barriers that worked to keep out wholly unsuitable candidates have now been largely eliminated.
Admittedly, this can pose a logistical problem for some companies. The glut of entry-level applications -- most from wildly unqualified candidates -- that descend upon companies in weeks following college graduation have attained near-legendary status.
But overall, most firms report that the number of inappropriate applications is manageable, and a small price to pay for the overall efficiency and cost-effectiveness gains they've realized from online recruiting. Furthermore, as the use of automated screening applications becomes more prevalent, the negative impact of inappropriate applications will be virtually eliminated.
A somewhat more thorny issue is the complaint that online recruitment erases the "human" aspect of human resources management. Although the automation of many phases of the recruitment process has led to massive gains in efficiency and cost-effectiveness, some critics have questioned whether this approach is too impersonal. This concern has validity in an era in which intangible factors such as a candidate's organizational "fit" and the sense of "clicking" with the existing team dynamic are considered more important than ever before.
The counter-argument, of course, is that the parts of the application process that are now regularly managed by an online system are typically those that were once handled through postal mail. After the initial rounds of information exchange, most companies take the application process offline and proceed with telephone or face-to-face interviews. However, the fact remains that the same streamlined standardization that boosts the efficiency of online recruitment does depersonalize and decontextualized the process to a degree, depriving both recruiter and candidate of some of the subtle cues and clues that can convey so much information in human interactions.
What Does It All Mean? Considering the Impact and Implications of Online Recruitment
While it is abundantly clear that online recruitment has inexorably altered the hiring process, its impact upon the overarching practices and principles of human resources and personnel management are not yet fully defined. At the current juncture, it seems as if the primary change has been a technological one, in which the newspaper help-wanted ads and snail-mailed paper résumés of the past have been neatly replaced with their electronic successors.
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