What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet for recruitment?

What is online recruitment?

Online recruitment (also known as E-recruitment or internet recruiting) allows businesses to use various internet-based solutions – for example, online advertising, job listings, social media and company websites to source and hire the best candidates.

The prolific use of the internet for recruiting has made it easier to source candidates and conduct interviews as well as process the relevant paperwork required to hire and train candidates. Online recruitment is a way to provide businesses with an efficient and cheaper way to fill positions.

In short, the advantages of online recruitment include: 

• Providing your company with a competitive edge.
• Online recruitment provides your hiring team with a better applicant pool.
• Online recruitment saves time and money by using automation and AI to screen applicants. 
• Automation from online recruiting can also be used to communicate with a large number of applicants at one time.

How can our company use online recruitment?

• ‍Company website. Your company website is the starting point to showcase your workplace culture and show people that you should be their employer of choice. You can post job listings on your company website and let your applicants know about your company culture. Depending on the size of your business, you can have a simple page dedicated to recruitment or a separate site altogether. To boost the effectiveness of your company website's career page, include videos or testimonials from current employees about why they love to work with you.‍
• Internet ad campaigns. You can use pay-per-click ads on different search engines, like Google, and also social media platforms to boost awareness of your job openings. These ads can be either in written form or promotional videos. This online recruitment method enables you to widen your reach to get the best candidates.‍
• Social Media. Generally, LinkedIn is thought of as a professional social media site and most people would think of it when it comes to recruitment. However, other social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, shouldn’t be ignored. The type of social media used for online recruitment depends on your candidates' demographics. If you’re looking for professional candidates for leadership roles, LinkedIn is your best bet. However, if you’re seeking on-demand or hourly workers for retail and the restaurant industry, Twitter and Facebook may be suitable platforms. Instagram is also growing in popularity as a way to market a business overall and recruit online.

If you want to get some inspiration about how companies are using social media successfully to recruit clients, click here to read this blog.

• ‍Online job sites. Most people ask whether free job boards are still relevant today. However, you only have to look at the popularity of job boards, like Monster, Indeed and Career Builder, to see the thousands of jobs posted. Therefore, the demand for jobs continues to grow. Some of these sites provide an opportunity for employees to share their feedback on what it's like to work with a particular company. With online job sites, you can boost your vacancy to appear at the top (by paying a premium).‍
• Dedicated contact sourcing. Instead of using general social media, like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can go to specific platforms to hire for specialized roles. For example, GitHub is a platform for web developers. If you have a web developer position or something similar, you can browse GitHub and see the listed portfolios. You then find the email address of the people who you think would be a good fit for your company. This means you can liaise directly with potential candidates and include them in your talent pipeline straight away.

Advantages of online recruitment

What are the advantages of using the internet for recruitment? There are several advantages of online recruitment, all aimed at a more efficient hiring process and providing better candidate relationship management.

Here are some of the benefits of online recruitment:

Using online recruitment to ‍reduce time to hire

Most online recruitment sites use automation that allows companies to start looking at resumes from qualified applicants within minutes of submission.

The online recruitment system evaluates initial selections according to the criteria specified and they will alert you when an applicant's resume meets them. Online recruitment is very different from a conventional newspaper magazine or trade journal job listing. With online recruitment, your adverts are placed in front of the right people 24 hours a day.

To reduce the time to hire, ensure that your applications are mobile-friendly and easy and quick to fill out. Research shows that most applicants will dump an application form if it takes more than five minutes to complete.

Download our free report, "Five Ways To Increase Your Application Process," for tips on how to get the best out of your application forms.‍

Cost effective recruiting method

Recruitment costs can add up very quickly. This is because recruiting costs not only take into account the actual expense of sourcing and hiring candidates, but also onboarding, training and retention counts.

Every employee needs to get the proper training and onboarding within a set timeframe to be proficient at their job. If there’s a high turnover rate within a short amount of time, it means the employee will have left the job without the company recouping their recruitment costs.

The recruitment life cycle will have to begin all over again. Using cost effective recruitment methods significantly reduces the amount you spend. For example, spending money on traditional advertising is very expensive compared to free job boards. Even when signing up for a paid platform, the price will not be as high as advertising in newspapers and magazines.

Reach a wider audience with internet recruiting

With online recruitment, you can reach a more targeted and wider audience. If you’re recruiting applicants for remote work, you can reach job seekers in any country. You can also use recruiting job boards to specifically target different industries and professional associations to ensure only the right people see and apply for your vacancy.

When using online recruitment, you have the freedom to expand your job search to source the most qualified candidates. This means you can go outside your normal area to reach people from all over the world. You can also narrow down your search. For example, if you’re a restaurant owner looking for delivery drivers within a certain city, you can tailor your job description to that region. You won't have to waste time looking through applications of candidates who live too far away.

Online recruiting increases hiring efficiency

Online recruitment provides technology to improve the full recruitment life cycle. This includes employment pre-screening, background checking, and assessments. The resulting efficiency means that the time it takes to find a qualified applicant is reduced.

One of the advantages of online recruitment is that you can use one modern recruitment solution for a variety of functions.

For example, Fountain provides a host of features including:

• Integration with third-party vendors to carry out background checks, assessments and pre-employment screening.
• Interview scheduling.
• In-depth analytics.
• Job posting.

You don’t have to go from system to system because everything is done in one platform.

Another part of Fountain's efficiency is that it saves time in writing great job descriptions. We provide free job description templates for most of the popular jobs. You just edit them according to your company's needs and then use them to get the best candidates. In addition, we provide a way to send this job description to the most relevant job platforms without you having to lift a finger.

With Fountain's Boost, all you have to do is let us know how many people you want for a job vacancy and your budget for advertising and we'll do the rest. We’ll post your jobs on the most suitable, free and paid platforms to ensure you only get appropriate candidates. This saves time because you get to review all the applications in one simple dashboard. This is online recruitment efficiency at its best.

Online recruitment brings more job applicants

When using online recruiting, you benefit from more applicants because your job reaches a wider area.

Consider that a survey has found that 79% of all people in the US use online resources to search for jobs. The Internet is a go-to resource to find different kinds of jobs. As a company and recruiter, you need to be where your candidates are looking. Submitting your vacancies to the right job boards and recruiting platforms will boost the number of quality applications you receive.

So that the increase in applications doesn’t slow you down, you need an online recruiting system that ensures only the qualified candidates go through a manual review. Most companies use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to do their preliminary screening.

This means that your ATS will review the resumes that  come through based on keywords and phrases. It will then suggest the resumes that should go through and those that should be dropped from the hiring process. This frees up your time because only the most suitable resumes will be reviewed manually.

Recruiting on the internet improves communication

It's important for your company's brand and reputation to have positive interactions with applicants, irrespective of whether they get through the first phase or are shortlisted for an interview. Therefore, you should attempt to communicate with every single applicant who has applied for an open vacancy.

With e-recruitment, this becomes easier and less burdensome as you don't need to get on the phone or send individual emails that take a considerable amount of time. Instead, if you use modern hiring software, you can send mass personalized SMS messages to your candidates at once. They will receive your information in SMS, which most people have access to even if they don’t have Wi-Fi.

Click here to read our blog about how SMS is the chosen method of communication with applicants.

Communication isn't only streamlined when it comes to communicating decisions. It also works with online recruitment done by video interviewing. You can use one-way video interviews as a pre-screening tool to save time. A one-way video interview is a great way to assess how a candidate comes across before inviting the individual to a phone or even a face-to-face interview.

Video interviews won’t be complicated with the right software. With Fountain, a video interview can be recorded directly in the app and sent straight back to you. You and your hiring team can then review the video at your convenience and get back to the applicant about whether they have come to the end of the line of the application process.

Create a better candidate experience with e-recruiting tools

If done correctly, online recruitment can increase the candidate’s experience and, therefore, their perception of your brand.

How you communicate to candidates is very important because, even if they’re not suitable for your company, they may leave reviews on sites, like GlassDoor, about how you handled the recruitment process.

These reviews hold a lot of power and, if a candidate had a negative experience, they could dissuade someone suitable from applying. Therefore, when using online recruitment, ensure that you treat every candidate, whether successful or not, with respect. Even if a candidate is successful and you've hired them, their experience during hiring will determine whether they stay with your company long-term.

The above online recruitment advantages are clear. However, they can only be realized if you use the right tools and technology. Using modern hiring software, like Fountain, enables you, your hiring team and your candidates to benefit fully from streamlining the recruitment process.

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