Many employers rely on job portals as a primary source of professional talent both on a stand-alone basis and also to complement traditional hiring methods. Evidently, there has been a paradigm shift in the way companies recruit their staff through online mode rather than the traditional hiring methods. Online recruitment has been credited for its value, efficacy and ease-of-use.
The flourishing of the electronic recruitment (E-recruitment) has been favoured by adequacy of career sites and ever skyrocketing levels of internet penetration that has enabled geographic boundaries blending possible, thus increasing professional mobility (Ronly 2007). As a consequence e-recruitment has ushered in a brave new world for jobseekers and employers. However, the issue of concern is the benefits and limitation of online recruitment disregarding its meteoric rise in its use and revolutionized how the organizations hire and candidates search for jobs in a short time.
Therefore, examining strengths and weakness is vital to understand the real outcome of this new venture for recruiting this valuable asset online. Strengths of e-recruitment The first benefit of online recruitment is the reduced time-to-hire. Online recruitment allows for immediate real-time interaction and 24/7 recruiting and job search activity. For instance, the employer can post a job in as little as 25 minutes on a career site such as bayt.
com and within no time the job seekers online searching for the vacancies replies at a click of the mouse and the employer start receiving replies such as CVs almost immediately. This is far much better than the traditional method where a newspaper ad may take appear a week later and only for a day causing an employer to wait longer like a month to start receiving responses. Generally, online recruitment is on average 70 percent faster than traditional hiring methods (Rankin 2006).
The employers have wider reach for candidates facilitated by ever skyrocketing internet penetration and improved accessibility to potential candidates. This is because the potential candidates by using online method are able to access jobs in companies, locations and industries they may not otherwise have learned of and can apply immediately with the click of a mouse. When the candidates post their CVs online they can be contacted by employers directly for opportunities that may not even be advertised hence they can be considered first from the hiring pool.
On the same note but a different carder level, potential job seekers enjoy a wider reach for employers disregard to geographical barrier since portals have current and active talent databases that cover all career levels, industries and regions (Davidson 2004). E-recruitment has enhanced process efficiency that contributes significantly to another major benefit of being a cost effective method for recruiting new staff.
Importantly, online recruitment has reduced cost-of-hire for organizations. For instance, recent studies indicate that most firms’ recruitment costs have decreased sharply by almost 90 % after the shift toward online systems (Ronly 2007). For example, it cost a firm USD250 to post a job on a site like www. bayt. com as oppose to 30% of annual salaries fee that many traditional recruiters charge or newspapers publication (CIPD 2008).