CAPÍTULO 3: Evaluación de la Propuesta
3.11. Resultados de la Evaluación
E-recruitment [the "e" stands for "electronic"] and e-selection have become very significant tools for many employers. The latest figures suggest that more than 80% of organisations make use of electronic media to recruit (and sometimes to select) staff, even if in some cases this goes no further than making information about vacancies available on the organisation’s corporate website.
E-recruitment implies the use of electronic resources, especially the Internet, for purposes of recruitment (and sometimes selection as well, particularly pre-selection testing and other processes intended to eliminate unqualified or otherwise inappropriate applicants).
Companies and recruitment agencies have moved many of their recruitment processes online so as to improve the speed by which job candidates can be matched with live
vacancies. Using database technologies, online advertising boards (like Monster.com) and search engines (like Google), employers can now fill posts in a fraction of the time.
Some organisations use job boards (websites with job advertisements), often together with portals through to or from their corporate website. Whereas at one time the vacancies promoted in this way were focused on graduate appointments and IT staff, the kinds of jobs now covered by e-recruitment are far more wide-ranging, especially as the cost and time benefits from e-recruitment are so impressive.
What E-recruitment can Involve
Organisations operating an e-recruitment system for all or part of their people resourcing processes may offer any or all of the following on their dedicated website:
An online corporate brochure describing the nature of the business and its culture
A graduate or other mass recruitment channel – for example, for contact centre positions or apprenticeship schemes
Information on one-off vacancies including a contact name, email address and telephone number
A detailed job specification and any other information normally sent out with a traditional application pack or dispensed at the interview stage
A speculative application facility
An online application form
Some killer questions or self-selection questions to help applicants decide if this is the job or the organisation that would suit them. (In the UK, the supermarket Asda
reputedly offers a framework for self-selection questions; if the applicant "fails" this test, they are directed to the Sainsburys website!)
The Principal Benefits of E-recruitment
Research from various sources suggests that these are the typical advantages to be gained, so far as employers are concerned.
Significantly reduced recruitment costs, especially when contrasted with the costs associated with national magazine or newspaper advertising.
An enhanced corporate imagine, especially in the eyes of Internet-savvy young people.
Reduced administration expenses, since virtually every part of the resourcing process is conducted and recorded online.
An impressively abbreviated recruitment/selection cycle.
Access to a significantly wider pool of applicants, including overseas candidates who might otherwise only be contactable by means of very expensive international
advertising.
Organisations with specific recruitment obligations – for example, those needing large numbers of new graduates or a temporary workforce to cover for Christmas and holiday seasons – can achieve high levels of visibility, especially in targeted areas (like universities and colleges), at minimal cost.
E-recruitment is intrinsically a sequence that job applicants find attractive, especially those already equipped with IT capabilities.
Many of these same advantages also apply to candidates, though from a slightly different perspective. For example, the shorter recruitment cycle is helpful to applicants because they don’t have to wait so long before they know the outcome – and the reduced costs for
employers are reflected in similarly reduced costs for candidates who no longer have to pay for postage and stationery. Such costs may not seem all that significant, but they can become so if individuals need to make multiple applications, and already have limited financial resources.
The full benefit of e-recruitment has been earned by firms such as the Alliance & Leicester Building Society, AstraZeneca (pharmaceuticals) and BP, who all now accept CVs and full applications online.
The Disadvantages of E-recruitment
As doubtless you will have discovered in all your ABE studies, no benefit is without its disadvantages. Various studies have found that over 30% of organisations have
encountered “significant” problems with e-recruitment, whereas in private-sector companies, for some reason, this proportion rises to almost 40 per cent. It has to be said straight away, however, that some of these "problems" are self-inflicted, occurring particularly among organisations who think that all they need to do is simply "bolt on" some low-level online facility to their established recruitment processes, when in fact all their systems need to be reviewed "from scratch", as it were.
Nonetheless, there are some genuine disadvantages, and these have to be investigated and weighed before an e-recruitment and e-selection strategy is initiated.
Website advertisements can attract too many candidates. It is a fallacy to assume that a large number of applicants is invariably better than a smaller number – it often indicates in practice that the advertisement has been too loosely worded.
Website advertisements attract too many unsuitable candidates. Even though such applications can quickly be deleted, each one takes time to study and may involve some follow-up if it is the organisation's policy to send courteous rejection letters.
The UK Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD), points out that e-recruitment disadvantages certain groups that have only limited access to the Internet – for example, young black men in the UK, and whole sections of society in some
countries where the Internet is less pervasive.
Some applicants may be deterred from responding to an online advertisement if they believe that they website has been poorly designed, if it is slow to respond or required forms are not appropriately designed for on-line completion.
From a candidate perspective, the whole e-recruitment exercise can appear
excessively impersonal and bureaucratic, especially if its design is technology-dictated rather than customer-focused.
Sometimes information about vacancies is not provided in sufficient detail to enable potential applicants to decide whether they are appropriate. Job titles and even descriptive details by themselves can be very misleading.
Even though e-recruitment systems by themselves can be very fast, ultimately decisions may still be dependent upon human beings in the employer’s HR
department, and if these human beings are poorly motivated or inundated with work, then feedback to applicants can be frustratingly slow.
There are concerns about the security of personal information.