Don’t get ahead of yourself – e-recruitment basics

This is part 3 of a 5-part series on e-Recruitment. Resource Management are sponsoring the “RPO and e-Recruitment Forum” on the 29th September. To find out how to book your place, click here.

Last week we highlighted some social media mistakes made by big business. This week, we go back to basics and identify how to deal with some of the problems of e-recruitment.


Current e-recruitment issues

As with any form of recruitment, e-recruitment has its challenges.


HR Magazine recently reported that “on-line recruitment is failing to take account of jobseeker’s views”. This came after a Changeworknow survey of 800 applicants found a variety of statistics showing jobseekers were disheartened with their experience of online job boards.

On a similar note, a “twitition” (or “Twitter Petition”) aimed at Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs was launched by Twitter user @Amebo recently asking for changes in their approach to the job seeking process. Interestingly, though a good idea, it doesn’t yet seem to have picked up much support.

It is obviously important to take the views of the jobseeker into consideration, and not just see the process solely in terms of profit. To this end, as a recruiter, you must be making sure that you address the concerns of jobseekers. Whether this is by providing online support through live chat, a Twitter link and an email address on your jobsite, or though regular communication using a forum, polls and feedback buttons.


Potential problems with e-recruitment

Other problems can include increasing the number of unsuitable employees, applicant overload, losing candidates more easily due to a poor design, and ineffective use of e-recruitment in the first place, resulting in low responses.

Since the advent of social media and social networking for recruiting purposes, it has got far easier for applicants to get noticed and especially those who have the ability to create a top-notch CV, and none of the skills required to do the job. One such application making the process hassle-free is VisualCV.

VisualCV allows anyone to create an online CV much more easily than that of a traditional one, but do better CV’s make it harder to spot poor candidates?

Ineffective use of e-recruitment or weak design will result in poor response. For more tips on this and the other issues covered in this post, have a look at some of the links below:

• Top Ten Best Practices for Using Social Media as a Recruitment Tool – Career Builder’s guide on e-recruiting
• 25 Articles on Social Media Recruiting – From The Recruiters Lounge
• Do You Pass The Social Media Recruitment Test?

Next week we'll look at whether social media as a recruitment tool is really worth it.