ONLINE RECRUITMENT

E-Recruitment Is The Evolving Face Of Recruitment !

Recruiters today, no longer depend on any single source to hire talent. Most are likely to be using all available sources within their budgets like., employee referrals, consultants, newspaper advertisements and job sites. However, as the pressure mounts to hire faster while keeping the costs of hiring down, the more effective of these options would be used more. And this trend keeps employee referrals and e-recruitment in good stead. Using the power of Internet to achieve the human resource goals not only increases your productivity but also saves the time and money to give a competitive advantage. 


How has online recruitment caught on in India?

Monsterindia has been in business for 18 months now and we have seen exponential growth in business during this period. In January 2002, Monsterindia had 2.2 lakh user sessions on the site and this has gone up to over 17 lakh user sessions in August 2002. From the employers' side, the trend has been similar. Even as recent as in April this year, we were acquiring about 12-15 clients a month, but the current rate of acquisition is about 75 clients a month. Our resume database of 3.3 lakhs is growing at the rate of more than 35,000 new resumes a month.


What are the barriers to the concept gaining currency fast? 


The barriers to e-recruitment are mainly internet infrastructure in terms of penetration level as well as bandwidth and the traditional mindset of companies in sectors like manufacturing. Job sites are a well-established means of recruitment in segments like IT/software, whereas adoption is still in its first phase in manufacturing industry. We believe it's only a matter of 12-24 months before e-recruitment is widely accepted across all segments.


What are the advantages of online recruitment vis-a-vis physical handling that could drive clients into adoption? 


Online recruitment saves time and money. For example, while a job advertisement could still bring in a huge number of resumes, these resumes take up a lot of time of the HR manager and thus result in inefficient use of time. Monsterindia, for example, has sophisticated screening technology that can filter out unwanted, irrelevant resumes in the first step itself.


This saves the HR manager quality time, which s/he can spend on the relevant resumes. Secondly, e-recruitment is the only answer to HR managers when they want resumes 'right now'. Research indicates that the recruitment cycle can be reduced by at least 3-4 weeks using internet. And thirdly, of course, the cost of sourcing talent on Monsterindia is based on subscription.


With a small fixed investment, companies can hire unlimited number of people without any further investment beyond what they already pay for their subscription. This brings down the cost of hire of companies by more than 80%.


What are the global trends in online recruitment and what is the impact that can be expected on the Indian market?


In the US, internet recruitment grew by more than 40% in a difficult year like 2001, whereas recruitment advertising in print declined by 37%. Forrester research predicts that the share of online recruitment advertising will increase from 15% in 2002 to 29% in 2007. Practically all companies use internet for recruitment.


Source: The Times Of India