Should you be using e-recruitment?

Posted by Tim Cincotta

E-recruitment as an industry has grown rapidly over the past 5 years. As the many provides across the world continue to grow and innovate, more and more companies are taking a provider on.

So if you don’t already have a system, why should you look at one?

• It saves time and at the end of the day, time is money

• It helps you keep clearer and more consistent communication with all candidates

• You won’t get lost in a mountain of emails between line managers

• You can easily keep track of where your current roles sit and the status of all applicants

• You can easily keep your own database of candidates

• You won’t use up a tonne of unnecessary space in your Outlook folders.

• You will have less need to print applications and this means less paper wastage

So you are still not convinced. Let’s see if we can tackle the FBO’s (frequent business objections); 

I am comfortable with how I do things now
That doesn’t mean what you do now is effective. It just means you are familiar with it. You will never grow as a business or individual if you constantly sit in your comfort zone and don’t push yourself to find more efficient processes. Remember in business if you are standing still, you are going backwards. 

Line managers won’t like it, they just want candidate details emailed to them.
I hear this a lot and it begs the question; who is in charge there? If you are the HR or Recruiting Manager, you should be in charge of recruitment practices. You wouldn’t tell the sales manager how to sell  your product, don’t let them tell you how recruitment should be done. 

We don’t have the budget
Remember the point above about time is money?  E-recruitment systems come in all shapes and sizes nowadays and there are a number of really effective low-cost solutions which given the time they save, can easily pay for themselves. 

We are too small
Define too small? Do you have one employee? Yes? Then there is a solution for you. With the growth of cloud technologies, e-recruitment providers have been able to develop low involvement services which you can opt to use if and when you need them. 

We don’t receive enough applications to justify it
E-recruitment is not just about managing bulk lots of applications. It is also about streamlining your recruitment process for consistency across your organisation and improving the candidate experience. 

So no matter how big or how small your company is; how often or how little you recruit or how tight or how large your budget is; e-recruitment has a solution.

My key tips when looking for a provider;

• Note down why you are looking for a provider;

• Make a list of the features you are ideally after;

• And state your budget and expectations of the service.

From here let the providers you contact state their case for each of these points to see what works best for you. 

Tim Cincotta is the Sales Director for Talent Propeller New Zealand. Connect with Tim on LinkedIn here or read Tim's other blog posts here.