Online recruitment, also known as e-recruitment, is the use of the World Wide Web and other ‘online’ or internet technologies to help the recruitment process. Online recruitment is commonly used by recruitment agencies and recruitment businesses to help source candidates and workers. Increasingly other organisations that wish to recruit directly are also turning to online recruitment to help them increase effectiveness and reduce costs.
A wide variety of technologies can be used in online recruitment. Chief among these are online recruitment software and job board software. Jobshout fits into both of these categories, but, unusually, it is an online service, or Software as a Service (SaaS) rather than software, which has to be installed and maintained by the client.
In 2006 almost two-thirds of responders to a survey conducted by CIPD described themselves as using e-recruitment, and there is no doubt that this percentage will have increased significantly since then. The internet is now by far the most significant medium for recruitment; the previous dominance of print media has been greatly eroded.
Technology can be used:
The amount an organisation invests in its online recruiting (from custom designed sites to basic information pages) will depend on organisation's strategy for macximising its use of the internet. A basic approach is to give a list of vacancies and contact details. A more in-depth one would involve a dedicated web site area that gives details of vacancies, person specifications, benefits and the application process. Jobshout is designed to facilitate this process.
Advertising jobs on your own website is not only beneficial in terms of adding functionality for visitors: another very significant benefit is that significant amounts of content become available for search engines to index, resulting in the likelihood of a considerable growth in the number of visitors the website receives.
Note: Indexing by search engines assumes that the jobs area is based on technology and information architecture that are search-engine-friendly. It is not uncommon to find database-driven job sections that can never get indexed because of the way they have been built.
These large databases of vacancies may republish adverts in newspapers and trade magazines, or be used by employment agencies and other organisations to advertise vacancies.
Online recruitment can
Any organisation who has a modest number of jobs to advertise can benefit from adding a job board to their own website. As mentioned above this can be a very effective way of attracting traffic to the site, and of enhancing the company ‘brand’.
Running your own job board is not necessarily an alternative to using other commercial job boards, but is often used as an additional strategy, and a highly cost-effective way of getting applicants and clients.
It can also enable the organisation to use technologies and techniques that are not usually offered by commercial job boards.
They include:
Jobshout is designed to provide this type of system.
Further reading…
Online recruitment survey
