Today, HR departments of a number of companies have adopted digital tools to streamline their operations, including recruiting. If you consider introducing e-recruiting in your company, it’s important for you to be aware of its advantages and disadvantages. 

In this article, we are not going to question the value of e-recruiting but show how it can be put in practice best taking into account its limitations. And we’ll consider the pros and cons of digital recruiting by focusing on 6 aspects that HR teams would be most interested in. 

E-recruiting tools and channels

There are four groups of tools and channels that HR teams actively use in the hiring process:

  • Applicant tracking systems (ATS). With ATS, you can store all your applicants’ profiles, schedule interviews, screen and evaluate candidates, and collaborate with other HR team members. ATS can also enable skills matching and job posting to multiple channels like social networks. For example, TribePad ATS provides advertising jobs anywhere on the web and features intelligent skill matching based on semantic technology.
  • Mobile recruiting tools. According to Glassdoor, 89% of job seekers say their mobile device is an important tool for job searching, and 45% of them use it to search for jobs at least once a day. For your HR team, mobile-friendly websites and recruiting mobile apps can streamline candidate search and CV assessment. For example, HR Virtuoso allows recruiters to quickly receive mobile-optimized application forms that candidates can fill out on any device.
  • Collaboration tools. Many HR departments employ collaboration tools like Yammer and Slack for interviewing applicants. Besides these tools, you can use HR-oriented portals that can help to connect your HR team with the rest of your organization and share information between recruiters and hiring managers. This may help to eliminate the silo approach and support effective recruitment. By using these solutions, recruiters and department managers can collaborate on defining job specifications, encouraging employee referrals, comparing and approving candidates. 
  • Social media. Besides employment-oriented social networks like LinkedIn, Xing or Jobcase, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have extended from personal matters to the workplace, and employers actively use them for job advertising and recruiting. Social media can help your HR specialists to target a specific talent pool and get useful insights directly from candidates’ accounts. As a result, they understand better whether a certain candidate suits particular recruiting needs.

Two sides of e-recruiting 

We’ll consider both positive and negative sides of six key e-recruiting aspects to help companies decide if they are ready for e-recruitment, to what degree they need it, and what tools will be relevant. 

Costs 

Pro. Due to process automation, e-recruiting can help to save money by increasing productivity and reducing the manpower required for each hire. 

Con. For the majority of e-recruiting tools, you may need to pay a monthly (e.g., BambooHR, Zoho Recruit, FireFish) or annual (iSmartRecruit, Invenias, employAstar) subscription. Some tools may also incur charges for extra services like analytics. What’s more, digital recruitment tools can be not cost-effective for small businesses or ones with low employee turnover.

HR process automation

Pro. Digital recruiting makes handling administrative duties like paperwork, interviewing, and testing applicants less time-consuming. Thus, Jobvite helps to reduce ‘time-to-hire’ by 25%. 

Con. Automated recruiting tools lack a personal approach to candidates. Neither recorded video answers sent by a candidate, nor a skype interview can give recruiters a precise picture of a candidate’s personality and psychological fitness for work.

Online communication 

Pro. Digital recruiting offers HR specialists online communication methods, for example, video interviewing. If your company’s HR team considers hiring a candidate from another country, video interviewing is the best way to assess them before meeting them in person. Besides, video interviewing is less stressful for candidates as they are on their territory – at home, which helps them to stay calm and focused during the interview. 

Con. Each candidate is usually given a specific time slot for an interview. And in case there are some technical issues with the tool, a candidate may lose their slot and the hiring party – their precious time. 

The accuracy of candidate matching

Pro. Keyword matching and scoring help to find suitable candidates and eliminate poor-match candidates before the interview, which makes the selection process free from human bias.  

Con. In a recruiting tool, a candidate is looked upon as a set of keywords, which is not enough for proper evaluation of their skills, experience, and personality. As a result, good candidates may be eliminated simply because they haven’t included certain keywords in their applications. Also, a digital recruiting tool can become a target for manipulation. For example, candidates can ‘make’ ATS to select them by stuffing their applications with the right keywords. 

Audience coverage 

Pro. As e-recruiting can reach candidates anywhere where there is the internet, an HR team will have many applications to choose from, including candidates from other countries. 

Con. The more applications a recruiter receives, the more of them can be irrelevant after a closer look. Besides, it may turn out after a successful interview that a remote candidate wasn’t really serious about relocating and your HR team just wasted your time.

The accessibility of information about applicants

Pro. E-recruiting can help HR specialists to receive more information about candidates through different channels (e.g., social media) apart from that available in their CV. This additional information can help your HR specialists to see if a candidate fits into the company’s culture. Also, your HR team can check the reliability of information about skills and experience by comparing profiles of the same person in various social media. 

Con. Using social media for employee recruitment exposes protected information, such as age, religion and even political views. And the chances are that this information can involuntarily affect your HR team’s decision-making when selecting certain candidates, which can lead to discrimination.

Afterword

Digital recruiting tools can help your HR team to save time, reduce labor costs, and find suitable employees. However, e-recruiting is not free from pitfalls that can essentially affect the hiring process. And for now, maintaining the technology-human balance by combining e-recruiting with the traditional HR methods seems to be the most efficient way for HR teams to hire new employees. 

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