E-Recruiting (HR) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

E-Recruiting (HR) - Essay Example 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 Inter