Introduction (9th May'2013)

INTRODUCTION:

Recruitment is one of the core activities of Human Resources. Effective recruitment brings in the quality of workforce whereas one wrong hired employee can lead to long term negative effects, among them high training and development costs to minimize the incidence of poor performance and high turnover which, in turn, impact staff morale, the production of high quality goods and services and the retention of organizational memory. Recruitment is always considered as a difficult activity by the Human Resource Manager as a lot of money and time is engaged in this activity and the failure in recruiting an efficient candidate puts a big question mark on the human resource department. E Recruitment helps an organization in collecting the pool of applicants which is further useful in selecting the best employee who fits the job, enabling an organization to prepare its quality workforce to get its work effectively and efficiently done. Human asset is the only resource of an organization that is with the passage of time appreciates and not depreciates like other assets. Human asset is the one that not only control and monitor their own activity but also control and monitors the other activity of other assets of the organization.

Years back, Recruiters were using the traditional methods like newspaper advertising, employee referrals and internal job postings for filling a vacant position. Now the things have changed and web is considered as a worldwide information resource. Human Resource Managers and the recruiters of big giant companies give preference to the electronic recruitment. Organization Websites, Social networking sites and job portal have made the work easier for managers in recruiting the best candidate and collecting the pool of applicants fro filling a vacant position. Studies by researchers also indicates that 75% of the fortune 500 companies now gives preference in posting the job to its own or different websites and adopted the method of e-recruitment. E Recruitment is relatively easy and inexpensive way to identify the quality and pool of applicants.  A Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) study reported that the average cost per hire from an Internet site was $377 versus an average cost per hire of $3,295 from a major metropolitan newspaper (Schweyer, 2004).

E- Recruitment also helps the Human Resource Department in reducing the time in collecting the resume as its give 24*7 access. It also reduces time by weeding out the unqualified candidates in an automated way. E-Recruitment also restricts the applicants and only eligible candidates can apply for the job. Taking an example of some of the online job portal likes www.rozee.com.pk & www.mustakbil.com we very often see that our resume is not accepted for every job related to our field even we are studying in the same field and have an experience in that field we cannot apply as if a minor thing or skill is missing in our resume it is rejected automatically. Employers put restrictions on few things like if they are looking for an applicant with 5 years of experience in the same field then the resume of an applicant with 4 years of experience will not be accepted and applicants fulfilling all the required skills and competencies will be able to post their resumes on the job portals. By this, organizations only receive the resumes of those applicants who fulfill all the requirements and it makes the job of recruiters easier.

E Recruitment is also the quickest way of collecting the pool of applicants. In using the traditional way of advertisement like newspaper we need to involve the intermediaries (Advertisement Companies) and have to give them the advertisement 2 days before the date of publish whereas, for advertising online we can just simply log on to the website and post the vacant position. It’s a fact that when we place the vacancy on different job portals and social networking websites like Linkedin and yahoo group we start receiving the resume in couple of hours and the candidates can be interviewed the very next day whereas, newspaper takes time as many processes are involved in advertisement in the newspaper like mentioned above first we have to find the advertisement agency, then advertisement is given to them and then we have to wait till Sunday to for the publishment of our advertisement.

We now spend 75% of our time in using the Internet and posting jobs on the internet and using e-recruitment is helpful for both the applicants and the employers. Now 75% of the organization, big or small is shifting to e-recruitment as it has been realized by them that e-recruitment is helpful in many ways and also reduces time, cost and helps in finding quality workforce and these are the important resources for any organization making an organization to compete in the competitive world.