E-recruitment is the name of the game

Riding on the back of a war for talent, online recruitment is steadily gaining a bigger share of the recruitment pie. While IT and ITeS companies have been their traditional clients, companies from diverse sectors such as auto components and pharma today are relying on online recruitment to fill up their vacancies. According to industry estimates, between 30% and 40% of placements are now made through the Internet, either through job sites of individual companies or through online recruitment agencies.

The IT sector was the first to move online. IT companies usually need to hire a large number of people. Therefore, IT human resources departments and job seekers are tech savvy and have access to the Internet at all times. However, with Internet penetration increasing to over 60 million users, and other industries like engineering and telecom, automobile and machinery, construction, pharma, banking, insurance and financial services also now growing rapidly and recruiting in large numbers, online recruitment has pretty much become the gold standard for all human resources departments.

Explains Jobstreet.com CEO Anand Iyer, "Companies look at e-recruitment when they start recruiting in large numbers. This is, typically, the case when a company is ramping up, hiring in thousands to set up a new centre." Jobstreet has a database of more than 5 million resumes with BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), technology, telecom and pharma companies accounting for its clients.

According to experts, the job search market including print medium and placement consultants will grow from Rs 1,500 crore in the financial year 2006 to over Rs 2,800 crore in financial year 2011 at a CAGR of 13.4%.

During the same period, the online segment is expected to grow at CAGR of 31%, gaining market share from the print and consultant segments and hence, is set to improve its market share of 10% in financial year 2006 to 21% in financial year 2011.

The benefits that online recruitment offers against traditional methods of recruitment have won it loyalists. The recruitment industry is highly information dependant. Online recruiting enables the industry to have access to a lot more information in lesser time. Says Hitesh Oberoi, COO, Info Edge, which owns naukri.com having a database of over 11 million resumes, "It's cheaper, faster, has global reach, works 24/7, allows you to target your search and also enables you through the right software tools to manage your recruitment process. On the other hand, job seekers take advantage of the filtering tools to filter out unsuitable jobs, making their search more efficient and convenient."

A few other advantages emanate out of the benefits that one gets out of process automation like email campaigns, search resumes and applicant tracking. Online recruitment also brings down the cost per hire due to technology deployment. "Going through a placement house means payment of one month's salary for every successful recruitment. Whereas going through a job portal would cost much less, and you also build up a database over time," points out Iyer.

It is the database of potential employees that is the goldmine for recruitment agencies and employers alike. Recruitment service providers use the database to select suitable candidates, headhunt the rest, and select the most fitting profiles. However, it is up to an organisation to effectively deploy this resource in their business, as sometimes there are discrepancies. "We witness significant inefficiencies in recruitment and thus, higher costs after using online recruitment. This may appear paradoxical," says Aditya Narayan Mishra, general manager, Ma Foi Management Consultants Ltd. This happens because an online tool helps one reach out to a wider community but not essentially the right group of candidates that the organisation targets.

However, having received hundreds of applications, one has to deploy resources to study them, scrutinise and interview them. "Many a time, we discover that the applications received are far higher than what is desired and most of them are from desperate job seekers rather than the brilliant candidate that the organisation should be targeting," he adds.

Traditional placement agencies are, however, unfazed at the growth of job portals. In fact, recruitment agencies are one of the biggest customers of job portals. Large recruitment service providers can also host online recruitments without much difficulty. Most of them also have their own online and offline database, though that may not be available to clients or candidates. Agrees Oberoi, "The online recruitment sites will not replace offline placement agencies. In fact, placement agencies are our clients. Increasingly, however, advertising from print will move online."

But there is space for both. It is also increasingly difficult to survive in isolation. Says Jacob Samuel, associate partner, Elixir Web Solutions, an HR recruitment firm, "Of course, there is space for both. In fact neither can operate effectively in isolation. Recruiting is a lot more than merely finding people." Online recruiting is a tool which when coupled with strong recruiting and probing skills will get you the best yield. When used in isolation this might actually result in the loss of some potential top-notch candidates that no organisation can afford in this day and age, with the raging war for talent, he points out.

A significant drawback in the evolution of technology is the loss of human interaction, which is applicable to the online recruitment process. In India, the cultural shift is a challenge in the online recruitment space, as organisations prefer to deal with people rather than e-mails. This is especially true for the hiring for senior executive positions. Traditional recruiting channels would be more appropriate keeping the confidentiality and the extent of networking and assessment in mind.

However, for larger volumes online recruiting would help reach out to more people and facilitate a larger pool generation. When it comes to short-listing and screening candidates, interviewing, negotiating and finally convincing candidates to join a particular company, offline placement agencies have a distinct advantage.

With online recruitment come online assessments. Impersonation and fudging during online tests are issues that sometimes keep companies away from online recruitment. However, job portals say that they have devised ways to restrict these if not completely prevent them.

Most companies go for proctored assessment that is supervised rather than unproctored assessment that's typically used to weed out unwanted candidates. "If unsupervised testing is conducted, we always recommend that further testing be completed later in the recruitment process to confirm and validate the results of the unsupervised test," points out Mark Cadman, managing director, e-bilities Pty Ltd. The Australia-based company has tied up with Ma Foi to offer online pre-employment screening tests.