(Lievens; Harris, 2003, p. 148) It has today become clear how far companies are influenced by this process of recruitment, but the fact is that many recruiters have not considered certain important questions. Some of them are, how exactly do candidates perceive the Internet, and how do they use the Internet? Do they consider the Internet to be a proper recruitment source, and if so, are they aware of which sources on the Internet would lead them to better employment prospects? Are the tests that are conducted on the Internet as part of the e-recruitment process today, better or worse than the traditional pencil and paper tests of older times? The research conducted by this team on the e-recruitment process revealed the following details. Today, the entire e-recruitment process has in fact managed to change the manner in which the staffing process within an organization is both conducted and understood. (Lievens; Harris, 2003, p. 150)

There are five major assumptions that underlie the usage of this process as compared to the older and more traditional recruitment process, and the first assumption is that the process of persuading the candidate to apply and then to accept job offers may be as important as making a choice between different candidates. When recruitment is carried on through the Internet, then the emphasis would be on attracting the prospective employees, first and foremost. A second assumption is that e-recruitment makes the entire job much quicker and faster and less time consuming than the traditional method. As is well-known, in the traditional method, the candidate would have to, at the very outset, locate a suitable opportunity, and then a suitable opportunity in a specific area, and then move on to creating a covering letter, preparing a resume, and then mail the entire package to the potential employer. (Lievens; Harris, 2003, p. 151)

However, when this is compared to the Internet and e-recruitment, it seems like an entirely unnecessarily long procedure. When the candidate is using the internet, he can peruse the numerous opportunities available to him on the internet, and then immediately apply, or at the very least, seek out the suitable jobs that he desires to apply for. He can apply not only to a lot many more jobs than ever before, but also in a very much shorter time than before. As a matter of fact, an individual may even be drawn to a job opening quite inadvertently, while surfing the net. The third assumption may be that one would automatically assume that important information about any particle organization may easily be available on the Internet, and, in fact, the usage of the Internet allows organizations to pass on much more information about them and their activities than ever before, and this would naturally mean that the candidate would have much more information available to him about the organizations that he is applying to for a job opportunity, and this would inevitably help him to make a better and a more informed choice about the company that he wants to work for. (Lievens; Harris, 2003, p. 152)

The fourth assumption is that the prospective job applicant may be induced to return to a particular website, and this is because of the fact that the internet is in fact designed to make viewers return to it time and again, and to hold their interest when they are there. one way of doing this is to enable 'cookies' that would immediately recall a particular customer's preferences and this would help a great deal when attempting t recruit an employee through the Internet. The applicant may want to return to the same site again and again whenever he wants to look for a job opportunity, and this can b made use of by the organization in its e-recruitment process. The fifth and last assumption is that the internet is infinitely less costly than the traditional means of advertising and recruitment, that is, about one tenth of the cost of the traditional method of recruitment. (Lievens; Harris, 2003, p. 152)

However, there are some people who opine that e-services are today being quite a neglected area of marketing research, and that there is not sufficient research to prove its advantages or disadvantages, if any. It cannot be denied that today, online services are becoming a viable and a practical and also a very attractive alternative to actually visiting the place and then waiting to be served. Not only are they...

(Liljander; Van Riel; Pura, 2001, p. 41)
Today, one of the most pressing problems that have been hitting the state government hard is the labor shortage in the labor market of the United States of America, despite the economic boom taking place today. One of the worst hit by the ongoing labor shortage today is that of the field of Information Technology; the Information Technology Association of America or the ITAA has stated that there are, today, about 350,000 vacancies in the IT sector alone, and even this figure would only include large businesses and not the innumerable smaller ones. Luckily, many states have started to fight back this devastating news by utilizing a variety of newer methods, including revamping their classification systems, to training their own employees, to using the new e-recruitment system to seek out new talent in the field and employ them in their organization. (National Association of State Telecommunications Directors. 1998, p. 3)

There is plenty of material available today on how to get the best employee for one's organization, like for example, the Book entitled, '50 One Minute Tips for Recruiting Employees', which offers tips like how the company can build the respect of its existing employees and become the best choice for an employee who is on the lookout for a suitable job. (Hayes; Ninemeier, 2001, p. 15) It must be remembered that recruitment is a situation that has high stakes for both the employer and for the employee, and the process of Internet Recruiting or e-recruitment is today being analyzed in depth for its potential advantages and disadvantages.

However, although the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages, it must be noted that there have been numerous disadvantages evident in this process of recruitment. The widespread concerns are about how far these recruitment systems are today replicating the earlier discrimination patterns, and also exactly how the applicant information is gathered and then distributed to all the prospective employers. When the overall objective of e-recruitment may be just an expansion of the potential pool, and therefore, the choice of the applicants to the job, one would tend to ask the important question of whether or not the real objective is actually being achieved. (Searle, 2003, p. 228)

As a matter of fact, evidence indicates otherwise; and it must be noted that while more importance is being given to how these new systems would benefit the organization, not much importance has been given to the applicant, especially to the transparency and to the accountability that surround the data collection procedures and methods and their dissemination systems. To further add to the problem, quite a few e-recruitment processes do tend to employ certain covert applications which are for the most part based on data collection, wherein information is gathered about a candidate's behavioral patterns. If the potential employee were to question these practices, in this type of high stakes environment, he would have to suffer. In addition, he would then have to withdraw from the race, and this would turn out to be a great disadvantage, since he would become an exception to the rule of e-recruitment through the Internet. (Searle, 2003, p. 228)

To conclude, it must be stated that e-recruiting has been considered to be a revolution of sorts ever since its inception about a decade and a half ago. Industry analysts, conference speakers, and high profile executives from the business world have all marveled at this simple and easy method of recruiting candidates for vacant positions. When e-recruitment was initially associated with online advertising, it was seen in Monster.com and other such services, and it was even at that time, known as e-recruitment, even though it was not a recruitment process at all. Gradually, e-recruitment began to be recognized for its potential, and today, it has indeed become a mainstream force and recruitment today is a much quicker and faster process than it ever was before. Digital technology is used for bringing in new talent into the industry, and increasingly, global corporations are becoming aware of this system of recruitment, wherein the best advantage is…