E-Recruiting

Introduction

A human resources specialist is one of the most important professions in modern companies. These people are responsible for all aspects of staffing including skills, knowledge, and the will to apply them and progress, the ability to work in a group and so on. The classical approach to staffing in most cases includes personal interview and execution of specific tests aimed at revealing the key skills required for a particular position. However, the changes in the digital technology led to the fact that companies tend to shift to e-recruiting. Among its benefits is the ability to assess a great number of individuals without the need of their personal visit. In particular companies, such visit is required as the last stage of the recruitment procedure. This approach allows saving time and reducing costs both for HR specialists and applicants. Nevertheless, this procedure has specific drawbacks, which are mostly caused by the fact that applicants are absent and present their information by means of the technologies of remote communication.

Therefore, this paper investigates the mentioned aspects of the e-recruiting process and presents strategies to allow HR specialists to mitigate the most common problems associated with e-recruiting. Moreover, it discusses the approaches for ensuring the employee’s psychological contracts and the strategies for attracting high-qualified candidates. Similarly, it analyzes modern websites in order to reveal their ability to motivate a person to apply for the job in the company, which keeps the website. Lastly, the important aspects of security are considered. The scope of the discussed information allows obtaining comprehensive knowledge about the best solutions in e-recruiting. As a result, HR specialists can increase their skills in e-recruiting in the case they share the proposed approach to this phenomenon and apply the suggested strategies.

Avoiding Unintended Consequences

It is important to characterize e-recruiting to avoid misunderstanding of the term before its discussion. Thus, recruitment incorporates practices and activities which are carried out by organizations with the purpose of identifying and attracting potential employees (Dhamija, 2012). E-recruiting, in its turn, denotes the process of recruitment done with the help of online digital technologies (Holm, n.d.). The modern sphere of HR practices in terms of recruitment is associated with the rapid increase of e-recruitment popularity. The reason for this is the number of benefits when using the specified procedure. Among them are a fast information exchange, lower advertising expenditures, accessibility of data, cost reduction of communication, and improved organizational attraction (Holm, n.d.). At the same time, specialists claim that this process has certain drawbacks. These include resume overload, increased diversity and quality of candidates, lack of personalized response to applicants, and candidates’ confidentiality (Holm, n.d.). Additionally, specialists name user discrimination on the basis of awareness of digital technologies, outdated resumes, and user-unfriendly-tools (Dhamija, 2012). Consequently, there is a need for the introduction of strategies to allow decreasing the negative outcomes of the specified drawbacks.

The proposed strategies are directed at the general purpose of selecting and attracting the most skillful and desirable candidates for a particular position. First, companies have to develop a specified domain on their website, which would allow job applicants to fill out the forms and sending resumes in the most suitable way. This approach requires the conduction of a survey, which would reveal the most common constraints for the users. Furthermore, there is a need for the introduction of the strict and developed system for the classification of applicants. Its general aim is filtering out candidates with low skill and reducing the time for resumes’ evaluation. Similarly, companies searching for employees should be more attractive and known to the potential candidates. Thus, despite e-recruiting allows saving costs of advertising, companies should spend more money on television and Internet advertisements. Lastly, the final stages of e-recruiting should include an online video-streaming interview in order to substitute the personal visit of a candidate and approve one’s validity and skills. Consequently, the proposed strategies would allow increasing a number of qualified candidates, sorting obtained resumes and avoiding useless routine work for HR managers.

Establishing Employees’ Psychological Contracts

One of the most persistent e-recruitment characteristics is the absence of personal contact between a HR specialist and a candidate. This may raise the issue when potential employees or workers of a company experience discomfort. Therefore, there is a need for the substitution of personal contacts with the technology. One of the common ways for doing this is video conferencing used as a substitute for a personal interview (Du Plessis, Nel, Marriott, & Mathew, n.d.). Among its primary benefits are reduced unproductive travel time, prevention of meeting delays, short and structured meetings, optimized attendance, fast response and access to experts (Earon, 2014). However, one of the most relevant positive outcomes is the establishment of psychological connection with a potential employee. Therefore, HR departments are advised to introduce video conference interviews at least at the final stage of the e-recruitment process.

Attracting High-Quality Candidates and Diverse Groups

Furthermore, there is a need for specification of strategies directed towards reaching high-quality candidates and diverse groups. First, the obligatory requirement should be the reduction of low-skilled candidates, which would allow saving time for discussions with more skilled individuals. Moreover, companies have to use developed applicants’ forms and resume requirements to specify the availability of specific skills. In this sense, online candidate forms may introduce automatic sorting procedures, which would ignore poor-skilled candidates (Kapse, Patil, & Patil, 2012). Similarly, the interface of such forms should include options for identifying the level of diversity of candidates. These should include the selections of age, education level, gender, marital status, race, and ethnicity, the presence of disabilities and representation of LGBT community. Additionally, there is a need for the introduction of psychometric testing, which aims at revealing the possibility for a candidate to present irrelevant information. Consequently, companies using e-recruiting would reach more qualified and diverse populations of their candidates.

The Importance of Website Attributes

It is important to note that website attributes may influence personal decisions of applying for a position in a company. It is evident that a website should be of high-quality, relevant design and present valid information regarding a company’s activity. Basically, a website should represent a hidden advertisement, which would motivate people to work. The example of such websites is Intel’s (“Intel”, n.d.) and Sany Group’s (“Sany Group”, n.d.) websites. The first company represents a digital technology company whereas the second one is a Chinese manufacturer of mining machinery. It is clear that both websites have a visual presentation, which suits their activity. Thus, Intel has more visuals aimed at visual attraction whereas Sany Group has an official business style. Despite visual differences, both websites are strictly targeted to their focus groups. Consequently, being a specialist in IT, a person would be interested in considering a position in Intel. Similarly, a mining engineer would possibly be attracted by the strict and official style of Sany Group website and check the positions in this company.

Security Control

Lastly, it is also important to consider the aspects of security because the process of e-recruitment involves operations with digital data transfer. As a result, companies and applicants may be at risk of exposing private and corporate information, sniffing, and other cybercrime procedures. Consequently, companies have to introduce specific security strategies to prevent the cases of cyberthreats. The four strategies should consider various domains of digital security. Among them are confidentiality, access control, integrity and finance (Niranjanamurthy & Dharmendra, 2013). Thus, companies should assure data encryption, which would allow keeping the users’, and administration’s digital records and data safe. Moreover, there is a need for the creation of an advanced system of access control, which would reject the attempts of passwords cracking by means of brute-force attack or other hacking techniques. Similarly, there is a need for the provision of data integrity and automatic defense from trojan programs, Denial of Service and other cyber threats. Applicants should accept the requirement and be informed about the need to check their systems for malware. Lastly, there is a need for defending data related to finances. The reason for it is that finance is the general aim of hackers in most cases. Thus, the data involving payment procedures as well as an applicant’s credit card and other information should be properly encrypted. As a result, the performed security measures allow creating a barrier for hackers and malware defending a company and candidates for a job.

Conclusion

Summarizing the information, the paper concludes that e-recruiting is a purely beneficial process for companies in the case of consideration of the proposed strategies. The discussion of the aspects of e-recruiting revealed that it is mostly beneficial because it allows saving time and costs associated with recruiting procedures. However, this process involves peculiar drawbacks such as the need for the mitigation of unintended consequences, establishment of psychological connection with candidates and other. Additionally, there is a need for the attraction of high-quality candidates and reaching diverse populations. The predominant part of these requirements can be mitigated by means of the introduction of automatic digital systems, which can sort out candidates based on different features. Lastly, companies should secure data storage, transfer and assure password encryption to defend digital systems from cyberthreats. At the same time, it is important for companies to create websites, which present relevant information and are attractive to potential job applicants. Therefore, the proposed interventions would increase the efficacy of procedures associated with e-recruiting, reduce costs and HR specialists load. Moreover, they would allow attracting high-skilled and diverse candidates and avoid problems of cybersecurity.

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