The Hiring Tools of Employers: E-Recruiting - Essay Example

Running Head: E-RECRUITING (HR) E-Recruiting (HR) of the of the E-Recruiting (HR) Introduction Although one of the latter steps in the hiring process, the choice of its hiring tool, remains basic for any company. The choice of the hiring method requires that the organization goes through a detailed procedure taking into consideration the cost of reaching the target group, the time scales involved, the fit with the organizational culture and the prospects presented to enhance the organization's public relations. One of the latest hiring tools at the disposal of employers is e-recruitment. E-recruitment defined The terms e-recruitment (e-recruitment), e-cruiting, cybercruiting, e-recruiting Internet recruiting, imply the formal sourcing of job information online. It is a fairly new practice. The first references to e-recruitment appear in articles of the mid-1980s (Gentner, 1984; Casper, 1985), while systematic reference to the e-recruitment in the HR journals begins almost a decade later, in the mid-1990s, when IT companies and universities begin to use the Internet extensively. Since then, the e-recruitment industry has been developing and it is estimated that in Europe it will have soared in value from just over 50 million in 1999 to 3.8 billion by 2005 (Taylor, 2001). Due to the novelty of the term, different authors have different concepts of what e-recruitment consists of. In this paper we take a view on e-recruitment that has been promoted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD, 1999). This states that the most common ways to use the Internet as a means to recruit are: - To add online hiring pages to the existing organization site. It is a very common exercise at the moment and its major benefit, namely the minimal cost related with creating a page on the company site, puts it forward as the smartest way to recruit on the Internet (Scheyer and McCarter, 1998). - To use Web sites specialised in recruiting employees, like "online recruiters", "job portals", "online job boards" e-recruiting "job agencies". Those sites ultimately act as mediums that connect the companies with potential applicants. The dedicated recruitment Web sites can take the form of job listing Web sites, which are very similar to printed classified advertisements; work-wanted sites, which emphasize the prospective employee's side; and, finally, online recruiters who make use of other Web sites as a resource for finding clients and customers (Rudich, 2000; Taylor, 2001). - To use a media site. In this case, electronic advertisements appear similarly and simultaneously with traditional printed advertisements in the original paper (newspaper e-recruiting magazine). Classifieds on the newspaper's Web sites are sometimes offered free to anyone paying for a print advertisement. The scope of e-recruitment also involves providing the possibility to conduct remote interviews and assessments, such as psychometric e-recruiting aptitude tests online, and using banner advertisements and smart agents to search the Web. Interactive tools, which link the corporate databases with the Web site, like search engines, interactive application forms, e-mail auto-respondents and electronic mailing lists, are also at an early practice stage (Dysart, 1999; Taylor, 2001). Factors affecting the decision to recruit through the Internet In most relevant literature there are some commonly identified benefits and downsides for the companies using e-recruitment. The commonly cited advantages and drawbacks of e-recruitment in the literature are as follows: Advantages of e-recruitment Low cost The economy achieved depends on the e-mailing approach applied. Publishing vacancies on the corporate Web site involves almost no cost at all, while the cost of putting advertisements on dedicated recruitment sites depends mainly on the coverage of the particular site. e-recruitment also achieves considerable economies of scale in terms of the number of words used because, through the Internet, there is no limit e-recruiting charge on this parameter. Overall, one could claim that e-recruitment reduces all three costs generated from recruitment, namely not only job awareness, but also candidate selection costs and lost productivity because of the time it takes to fill a position (CIPD, 1999; Williams and Klau, 1997; Workforce, 2000a). Shorter recruiting cycle time One of the most widely-promoted assumptions on e-recruitment, which is generally calculated to free 25 to 30 per cent of HR time for strategic issues (Workforce, 2000a). Reaches a wider range of applicants This is mostly based on the fact that the Internet can reach people at worldwide level, in contrast to any newspaper advertisement, which would reach a local e-recruiting natonal group (CIPD, 1999; Workforce, 2000b). Better quality of response Applicants through the Internet are mostly young, computer educated and showing some concern in the recruiting company, particularly if they apply through the company Web site (Baillie, 1996; Frost, 1997), not to mention "accommodating change and, therefore, more likely to help the commerce grow and change" (Thaler-Carter, 1998, p. 64). Lately the number of older, non-IT staff using the Internet to find jobs has improved, with around half of them earning more than 30,000 while 60 per cent are competent to at least degree level (Welch, 1999). Gives the company a more up-to-date image Especially when building a corporate recruitment site, e-recruitment is considered to attribute to the company an image of innovation and flexibility (Fister, 1999). The fear of staying behind induces many human resource managers to recruit through the Net (Hays, 1999, p. 76). Opportunity to address specific labour market niches Practices like posting a job opening as an e-mail to the discussion groups e-recruiting electronic forums of special interest groups enhance the targeting potential of the medium (Baillie, 1996), while the existence of niche sites like christianjobs.com, bilingual-jobs.com, casinocareers.com (for casino workers), nsbe.org (for black engineers), MBAfreeagents.com, e-recruiting asia-net.com (for Asian-language speakers) provides for unprecedented fragmentation of the e-recruitment labour-market-targets (Greengard, 1998; Thaler-Carter, 1998). Attracts the passive job-seeker E-recruitment can act as a tool to attract the interest of highly competent individuals who are not currently searching for a job. Those are considered as the most "highly prized catch" by recruiters (Shand, 2000; Hansen, 1998), with their main quality being the interest they show for the company's activities. On the other hand, it is also sustained that scarcely would the highly-qualified, already employed, people "read want ads", e-recruiting "post their resumes on the Internet" (Hays, 1999, p. 79). Provides global coverage at a constant basis The Internet has no boundaries but language barriers, which can be overcome. Some companies have already taken advantage of this aspect, to facilitate the recruiting process for their overseas operations. Instruments like online questionnaires and psychometric tests e-recruiting video-conferencing for the interviews can be used at the first stages of the selection process, to ease the whole international staffing effort from a distance. (Baillie, 1996) Disadvantages of e-recruitment Needs to be applied as part of an integrated recruitment process: Many organizations lack the resources e-recruiting the expertise to achieve this (CIPD, 1999). Companies need to be ready to deal with the relevant IT tools, such as search engines, databases e-recruiting CV-screening, and to undertake a whole change management effort, in order that people get familiar with the implementation of the necessary tools (Workforce, 2000b). For the majority of job seekers, Internet still is not the first option (CIPD, 1999) Given the particularly quick raise of Internet use internationally, this should in general be expected to change in short time. Is mainly perceived as suitable for IT jobs and for young graduates. This reduces its effectiveness in the quest for other specialities and/e-recruiting for highly achieved professionals (CIPD, 1999). This preoccupation has its roots in the beginning and mid-1990s, when scarcely could anyone else, by lack of expertise e-recruiting access to the Internet, effectively search for work online (Baillie, 1996; Starcke, 1996). Concerning the graduate recruitment, there is an assumption that e-cruitment works best for initial assessment at junior levels, where little expertise is needed in shifting candidates (People Management, 2000), and more than a quarter of the firms that have a recruitment Web site focus exclusively on their graduate intake (Lamb, 2000a). In the case of professional and managerial positions, public approaches, like e-recruitment, for high-level management positions are still stigmatised, as "it might give the impression that you are desperate" (Useem, 1999, p. 156). One of the most puzzling attributes of e-recruitment is its effect on the corporate image. As the marketing purpose of e-recruitment has been greatly stressed in the literature, it was anticipated that perhaps the corporate image, rather than recruitment itself, is the major focus of e-recruitment efforts. The findings of the questionnaire supported the assumption that the positive effect on the corporate image affected the decision to use e-recruitment and 85 per cent of the respondents do take into account the marketing purpose of the tool when they decide to use it. It is important, though, that for 57.7 per cent, this is a secondary consideration for the HR department. Therefore, although most companies take into consideration the marketing purpose of e-recruitment, this appears to be mostly a secondary factor in their decision to adopt e-recruitment, with the exception of certain companies, for which the development of e-recruitment is taken up by the marketing e-recruiting IT department, with the HR department left outside the decision process. In two of the companies interviewed, the marketing department had taken all the steps to the development of the process, which, in both cases, resulted in the HR department neither having active involvement in the e-recruitment process, nor forming any specific ideas on the effectiveness of the medium. Quality of response For the most of the companies, better excellence through the Internet was problematic. Astonishingly, however, in two interviews the interviewees continued that the Internet does give better excellence of applicants. In one interview, in particular, it was support that the Internet agencies give the company with fewer but considerably better applicants, than customary recruitment agencies do. International reach The ability of e-recruitment successfully to reach the best applicants from all over the world has been mostly promoted in the US literature, which could be related to a somewhat greater internationalisation of the US firms. A MacKinsey report revealed that European IT players are relatively slow to internationalise their business activities (Hoch et al., 2000). Probably this explains why the international grip of e-recruitment was not of particular interest to the respondents of the survey. Recruitment cycle time The research did not agree with the eminent assumption about the savings in time achieved through e-recruitment. One manager characteristically stated that the savings in time are probably exaggerated, since the company has not experienced such effect since they adopted the practice of e-cruiting. The passive job seeker The other doubtful issue about e-recruitment concerns its potential of reaching the "passive job seeker". Although widely supported in the literature, it is debatable whether most companies actually succeed in their efforts to that direction. The common practice of keeping databases of online speculative job applications from the corporate Web site cannot be overseen as a way to target the passive job seeker and 86 per cent of the respondents accentuated the importance of the "passive job seeker" to the decision to use e-recruitment. Though, from the interviews, only one company has in fact put into practice a method to attract people who are not enthusiastically searching for a job and keeps a record of them to use when future situation arise. No company of those contact follow active search on the Web for resumes matching the post to fill. This is a finding that presents substantial complexity to explain. Almost certainly most of the companies feel that e-recruitment has the possible to recruit the passive job seeker and that was a major factor in their decision to adopt this method. However, they mostly rely on fate to access the passive job seeker, rather than dynamically search for such people online. The target niche For the sector in study a major part of the human capital comes from the group of young IT graduates, so the minimal concern on the fact that the Internet is considered best for the recruitment of ITs and young graduates was somewhat expected. As most interviews revealed, particular interest is shown for the recruitment of recent graduates, while the majority of the staff are employed in IT positions (more than 60 per cent of their total staff; in one case 95 per cent). For those companies, this attribute of e-recruitment was not seen as restriction, but rather as an advantage. There was a general concurrence that the Internet still is not the first situate that one will look for a job. Though, the interviews discovered that for some situation it is better to look on the Internet, even if that is not yet a collection job search tool. As a company put it most typically: Conclusions Most of the considerations on e-recruitment that surfaced during the research are not new in the recruitment literature. In fact, cost, time, coverage, reach of applicants, quality of response and impact on the corporate image are traditional considerations in the decision on the recruitment method. The suitability of the media for certain specialities and the balance between overload of answers and lack of answers to choose from, as well as the effect that the reputation of the company has on the effectiveness of any recruitment effort have also been traditionally widely discussed in the literature (Sisson, 1994, p. 194). In fact, several factors that have been promoted as downsides of e-recruitment are mostly symptoms of poor recruitment practice. An example is the consideration over the risk of overload of answers. Although the Internet reaches people from wider geographical and social contexts than an advertisement on a single regional e-recruiting national paper, it also provides for the possibility to better inform the applicant on the job description. The extended word limit of all e-recruitment job postings allows the company to communicate accurate and detailed information about the job to prospective employees, allowing them to self-screen and reducing the number of unsuitable applicants. This effect falls into the "realism hypothesis", according to which, the realism of the job description that is provided to the candidate increases the effectiveness of the recruiting source (Griffeth et al., 1997). It seems, then, that the effectiveness of the medium depends mostly on the implementation rather than on the recruitment source itself and many of the characteristics that have been attributed to the e-recruitment are highly dependent on the calibre of the whole recruitment process. Concerning the future of e-recruitment, the most popular position holds that its use will continue to rise as it has up to now, following the expected rise of the use of the Internet, in general. In addition to that, the recruitment-related software has become more readily available and cost-effective, a tendency that most probably will prevail in the future, while the HR departments are seen as gaining high-speed access to the Internet at no cost, as part of the overall online adjustment of most corporations (Hansen, 1998; Taylor, 2001). On the other hand, it could be that the up to now rise of e-recruitment has been exaggerated, due to the high labour demand for technical and professional positions around the world, that made such recruitment practice seem successful (Rudich, 2000). Given the findings of this research, concerning the general satisfaction and positive attitude of the companies towards e-recruitment, it would be expected that, even if e-recruitment does not become the major recruitment tool, e-recruiting proves to own part of its success to the tight labour market conditions, it definitely is here to stay. On the other hand, advanced tools, like resume scanning, online self-screening, video-conferencing and online psychometric tests, which are already used by companies like Cisco (Personnel Journal, 1996; Useem, 1999), will be more broadly used in the future. Moreover, the provision of Internet directories that direct candidates to any site that has posts matching their criteria has already started and is expected to force the recruitment Web sites to adapt and offer more developed services than those of pure "middlemen", in order to survive (People Management, 2000). Implications The implications surfacing from this current research are as follows: Implications for recruiting companies The recruiting companies that use e-recruitment should see to fully benefit from this practice, by applying all the traditional best practice guidelines concerning the evaluation of the recruitment needs, the provision of full necessary information on the job (from job description to job specification, etc.), and the specification of the recruitment target niche. The e-recruitment provides them in this respect with enhanced capabilities, like extended word limit and use of specialised agents, keywords and Web sites to target the right people. The main deduction from this study was that the e-recruitment, no matter how revolutionary, is just a channel and that the success of its implementation depends on the thorough planning and on the use of the established HR practices concerning the recruitment. Legal implications It is imperative to legally regulate the ownership of the labour information gathered on the Internet (Thaler-Carter, 1998; Piturro, 2000). The major ethical issue around e-recruitment concerns the confidentiality and trust during resume handling by online recruiters. The existing law in the UK stipulates only that a candidate's information must only be disclosed in the course of looking for employment opportunities, but not if the candidate has made any requests to remain confidential (Anstead, 2000). The common practice of companies to share the resumes sent to them with other firms, is seen as unfair to the candidate who has only applied for a particular position. Potential problems include a company forwarding a resume to a candidate's current employer, as the result of a resale. Apprehension have also been elevated over the common exercise of recruitment sites to post fabricated vacancies in order to attract CVs, which are then circulated to companies, often against the candidate's will. More frighteningly, some head-hunters "unlock" corporate Web sites and roam the site for staff listing, CVs, photos and organizational charts, which they later on sell either to recruitment agency, Finally, e-recruitment raises concerns on e-recruiting directly to companies that may be paying attention. the provision of equal opportunities to all applicants. E-cruiting should perhaps be used in combination with other more traditional tools, in order to eliminate the opportunity of allegation that certain sites are not equally at the temperament of different social groups, and therefore comprise a source of indirect bias. Another, related issue is the risk of the paper proving that the proper measures have been followed getting lost, lacking a trace. A suggestion is always to "fall back on traditional methods to corroborate everything" (Whitehead and Rana, 1999). Such a practice, however, would absolutely reduce the usefulness of e-recruitment on time and cost savings. Research implications It is recommended that any future research, to examine the effectiveness of e-recruitment, should establish the connection between the satisfaction (perceived effectiveness), with the size of the company, the number of e-recruitment practices and the extent of use, as well as the integration of it in the overall recruitment effort. Although not tested through quantitative analysis in the current research, those relations were suggested from a comparative analysis of the whole quantitative and qualitative findings. References Anstead, M (2000), "Online recruitment: planned changes in the law could lessen the dangers of seeing our CV hawked round the Internet", The Financial Times, pp. 17. 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