E-recruitment refers to use of the electronic platform such as the Internet to hire new employees. E-recruitment has changed the way human resources managers undertake their profession in the contemporary era, as it has led to improved proficiency and effectiveness in recruitment efforts, as compared to conventional methods of recruitment.
The advantages of e-recruitment include affordability to the applicant, promptness as curriculum vitaes are processed speedily hence vacancies are filled faster, reduced subjective hiring, and e-recruitment is not limited by geographic features. Despite the success of e-recruitment in human resources efforts, the strategy has experienced several drawbacks such in security and privacy issues, high cost to small companies, accessibility to some individuals and usability in hiring high-level management employees.
According to this article, e-recruitment is projected to influence the hiring process of many organisations in the future. Several surveys listed in this article indicate that, in the future, use of e-recruitment will go beyond mere online recruitment because e-recruitment will encompass online assessment of prospective job applicants, organisations will be searching for potential job candidates online and there will be software that will automatically screen job applicants without the intervention of people.
Similar to any electronic-based application, e-recruitment’s greatest threat is privacy and security. For e-recruitment to work, applicants are required to fill their personal information such as emails, names, date of birth, financial information in the form of bank account details, age and nationality.
If this information were to fall into the wrong hands, malicious people would use it to steal the identity of other people or send malicious emails that contain computer viruses and malwares to their computers. Expert warn that issues on security and privacy of personal information given by millions of job applicants to recruitment websites remain the most troubling issues in e-recruitment.
Discussion Question and Answer
What Are the Challenges Related With E-Recruitment
Despite the substantial benefits associated with e-recruitment, various organisations face many challenges linked to this human resource strategy. Some of the difficulties faced by organisations encompass issues on implementation of e-recruitment, challenges with the technology besides challenges in adapting e-recruitment structures to meet the specific needs of the staffing process. Additional difficulties comprise lack of assimilation of e-recruitment structures to current human resources schemes.
A typical trouble that has been identified with e-recruitment, relates to e-recruitment acceptability to a wider range of interviewees. In some situations, some applicants prefer to use conventional methods of applying for jobs such as letters instead of modern e-recruitment structures, which are in the form of emails and the Internet.
Nonetheless, with the increasing acceptability of e-recruitment processes, this challenge seems to be becoming much less of a concern, as job candidates are utilising the Internet as a tool in their work search practice.
In view of this, most surveys and researches that have been done in recent times show that there is a considerable increase in the utilisation of the Internet and other online-based methods, as the ideal job application processes for the great majority of applicants. Nonetheless, the results of most researches that have explored this issue of the acceptability of e-recruitment in human resources processes have revealed concerns in relation to applicant’s access to e-recruitment tools.
Currently, most organisations are designing their e-recruitment procedures to be as applicant-friendly as possible to overcome e-recruitment challenges presented by the strategy. Furthermore, because e-recruitment has not wholly been accepted in the field of human resources, most organisations are still accepting employment requests through the conventional means.
As the challenges facing e-recruitment continue to be resolved by recruiting organisations, the e-recruitment system is expected to become the sole method of hiring new employees in the future.