Internet Is in Fact Revolutionizing

¶ … Internet is in fact revolutionizing the entire world, in multifarious aspects, in the business as well as in the personal world. In business, the recruitment process for a new employee to join a firm has been completely changed and revolutionized by the Internet, and today all the traditional and slower process of recruitment have been bypassed in favor of the new process that is known as 'e-recruitment'. In a traditional method of recruitment, the company would have to initially invest an amount for the advertising of a 'situations vacant' column in a newspaper or a magazine or elsewhere, after which the candidate must apply, after which the candidates who have applied would have to be sifted through carefully, their various qualifications analyzed and adjudged, and then called for an interview. There will be many people involved in the entire process, like for example, the advertiser, the agency that handles the advertisement, and so on and so forth. Today, however, the entire process has been reduced to a simple enough procedure, wherein all the company has to do would be to include a short advertisement into their already existing website. Prospective employees would simply have to apply directly to the company for the job, or indicate their interest in working for a particular brand, after which they would be called for the interview. This means that today, companies have in fact become their very own 'agencies', which invite the so called 'passive' job seekers into a database for future reference, when jobs may become available. Those companies that have a high turnover division, such as, for example, a call center, have been the first to recognize the benefits of e-recruitment, and also of maintaining a database where the names and other details of potential future employees may be stored for easy referencing at a later date. Some company career sites provide a facility for potential employees and job seekers wherein they may be able to create a personal account with an e-mail address and a password, and give relevant information about themselves through an online application form, which would be made available to the employers for their own perusal.

E-Recruitment contrasting this to more traditional forms of recruitment

In essence, e-recruitment is a process by which a business organization of any kind conducts recruitment operations through web-based tools. Today, as a matter of fact, more and more organizations are using this method to recruit new candidates for any positions vacant that they may have within their organization, and growing evidence shows that more companies are today trying out this method so that they may be able to enhance their corporate image and profile, so that they may reduce recruitment costs and time, so that they may be able to reduce the large administrative burden of recruitment, and also so that they may employ better and more modern tools for recruitment purposes. (E-recruitment, is it delivering?)

E-recruitment has been defined as the process of recruitment of employees by way of the Internet. The process was in fact originally used in order to recruit personnel from the Information Technology industry, as well as for high technology people. Today, this form of recruitment has evolved rapidly into a much simpler and easier form of recruitment in comparison to the traditional ones, and it has grown at the same increased rate of growth as that of the Internet usage. Any and all types of jobs can be advertised via the internet, and all companies will find the internet to be a most useful medium in order to put across their advertisements, for the purpose of recruitment of any new talent into their organizations. (Robertson; Smith, 2001, p. 462) There are also cases where individual employers advertise jobs for new recruits through the Internet, and there are also 'job boards' wherein specialist Internet companies today act as 'labor market intermediaries' wherein they see to advertising vacancies on a website and then keep all the details of job seekers on file for future reference. There are also Internet Directories which list all job vacancies on company sites and furthermore, allow free connections from the Directory to the company websites. (Noon, 2001, p. 112) It must be stated, therefore, that today, e-recruitment and the creation and the development of appropriate relations for maintaining employee relationships are becoming a part and parcel of the so called 'knowledge era'. (Torres-Coronas; Arias-Oliva, 2004, p. 10)

What must be remembered is that today, on account of the new system of e-recruitment, the market for human labor is also widening, and the world today is truly becoming global and small, as distances are shortened, and miles do not have any meaning at all in this Internet age. The process of recruitment today is much swifter and more informed than ever before and today several companies are in fact insisting that their prospective employees always reply online and not through traditional mail or other older methods. Some companies are also trying out certain psychometric and other tests that the candidates are expected to perform online, so that the interviewing process would also be eliminated, and the prospective employee would be adjudged online and either selected or eliminated. (Cairncross, 2001, p. 145)

It must be noted that there are numerous advantages of using the process of e-recruitment for recruitment of candidates. One of the biggest advantages is that this method today attracts the top talent available, and most companies would do well if they were to use the method, as against the traditional method of recruitment which today seems to be too long winded and slow. (Reed, 2001, p. 48) This is especially true in today's world where hyper competition and rapid and swift environmental changes are more the rote than something new. This means that al organizations must today not only attract the best talent in the industry, but also retain them. E-recruitment can be stated as being one of the fastest growing forms of e-business and e-commerce today. (Lee, 1998, p. 57)

This is obvious when the state of the U.S. economy of the past few years and the resultant decline in unemployment rates are studied. What becomes very obvious is the vitally important role that recruitment has been playing in the HR Department of several large organizations, and the fact that the medium of the Internet is being exploited fully by most companies in the United States of America. It must be noted that e-recruitment was virtually non-existent just about five years ago, and today, when it is still developing rapidly, companies are doing their best to take advantage and make use of the versatile medium of the Internet to recruit some of the best talent for their organization. (Brice, 2002, p. 63)

Today, as mentioned earlier, e-recruitment is a fast growing phenomenon, and tests and trials have indeed been carried out to find out if the process is all what it is purported to be. A case study was conducted by the 'Department of Management and Marketing, USA', to find out if e-recruitment would be useful for the recruitment of patients for clinical trials, as against the traditional processes of advertising and then finding people who would be ready for the trials. It must be noted here that acquiring patients for the purpose of clinical trials has long been a 'critical bottleneck' in the clinical trials process in a pharmaceutical organization. It was found that the media driven methods that they had been using was no longer very effective, because, for one, it was failing to identify patients on time, and, in addition, it was failing to generate the increasing numbers pf patients needed for such trials, in order to meet the steadily growing needs of pharmaceutical companies. (Smith; Manna, 2005, p. 414)

The Internet proved to be a veritable boon for these pharmaceutical companies, wherein the process of e-recruitment is yielding many more patients ready for clinical trials than ever before. In addition, time and energy are not wasted in the recruitment process, and in combination with the Internet's innate ability to 'narrowcast', today patients can be actually narrowed down to specific and specialized patient populations, as required by the pharmaceutical companies. (Smith; Manna, 2005, p. 414) Today, screening technologies are also effectively used through the Internet, and through the process of e-recruitment, it is today infinitely easier to find patient ready for clinical trials. It must be stated that web-based recruitment will, in future, be not only more cost effective and efficient and more effective, but it would also be able to engender more numbers of patients than through the traditional means of recruitment. (E-Recruitment Research Pavilion)

In another research conducted by Filip Lievens of Ghent University, and Michael M. Harris, of the College of Business Administration, University of Missouri, St. Louis, the effects and the future of e-recruitment were studied. They state that the use of the internet has been growing steadily over the past few years, especially in the area of e-recruitment, and in the testing of applicants for a job requirement, online. This is exemplified, according to the researchers, by the fact that in the year 2001, a technology showcase was organized for the Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, wherein the various uses of the Internet were put across and demonstrated, among which was the yet under developed e-recruitment process. (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 more convenient, but they also save a lot of time and energy and effort on the part of the customer, and the customer also feels much more in control of the entire service process. (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)