E-recruitment: The road to HR nirvana?

Battling to maintain a diverse workforce in far-flung countries? Or simply competing for skilled employees in a shrinking pool of candidates? There's never been a better time to succumb to the lure of e-recruitment, which is becoming an established part of corporate strategy as increasing numbers of companies set aside budgets for online recruiting.

Originally largely limited to IT, graduate and senior management roles, the Internet is fast permeating all levels and sectors of the HR and recruitment market. According to Forrester Research, 60% of Fortune 500 companies are using online recruiting as their primary job search tool.

It's early days yet, says Adam Sentonaris, a solution manager at software vendor SAP Africa, but as greater sophistication and maturity in the market emerge, growing numbers of companies will be looking to use e-recruitment as part of a general shift of their human resource (HR) operations to an electronic basis.

"The Internet is already penetrating the broader job market, but what we're seeing now is that a growing proportion of recruiters are now seeking to develop e-human resources (e-HR) and e-recruitment strategies," says Sentonaris.

However, you need more than fancy technology to develop a meaningful global HR strategy, says Sentonaris. It's critical to first set the strategy, then choose the technology to support it.

"Implementing a great technology will not give you a meaningful global HR strategy. Companies first need to examine the value proposition and know exactly what they are trying to accomplish with their global HR strategy, and why. Then they can wisely choose technology to support that strategy," says Sentonaris.

Qualified staffing remains a critical success factor for all enterprises, and there is worldwide competition for the best personnel. This "search for the best" places a difficult burden on HR directors, many of whom are being deluged with unsolicited resumes. Companies will be able to cope with today's reality while preparing for tomorrow's by combining cost-cutting strategies (for example, employing freelance and part-time talent) with a streamlined, Internet-based recruiting process.

"Recruiting is in the process of radical change. Savvy companies are using the Internet to integrate new, online recruiting methods into their business. This enables them to target and approach appropriate applicants quickly and develop a recruiting procedure that is more cost-effective than traditional procedures," says Sentonaris.

"Today a company with operations across the world can use the same engine to drive all its operations from a single database."

One example of the offerings coming out of the technology vendors, mySAP HR E-Recruiting, uses a central database of both internal employees and external candidates. It not only enables HR to fill current openings faster and with better-quality candidates, but also helps companies to maintain relationships, through regular emails and other communication, with potential candidates for whom no positions are currently open.

Global energy giant Shell is a pilot customer of the new global product. "We're convinced that the concept of e-recruiting, covering internal as well as external talent management and recruiting processes, will considerably improve the way we manage existing staff and new talent," Frank Meijer, HR business process architect at Shell, told the Human Capital magazine recently.

Where the early priority for employers and recruiters was simply to get responses to job advertisements, the focus today is more on improving the quality of candidates. As e-recruitment becomes part of e-HR, so the focus of recruiters is shifting towards accurately evaluating and comparing the relevant skills of candidates. This, in turn, is reshaping the services and functionality offered by pure play online job sites.

While finding a job remains the key motivation for using job sites, including the availability of job-related information, a range of other factors also drive site traffic, especially career-associated information such as training and careers advice and employment news.

Job sites are expanding the range of career-related information and services that they offer the job seeker, but Sentonaris says that for the foreseeable future, "clicks and mortar" will remain the most successful business model in recruitment: a symbiotic relationship between online and offline recruitment methods.

Job sites will continue to grow in sophistication and expand along the recruitment value chain in the short term, but ultimately employers will increasingly advertise jobs via their own Web sites as part of a coherent online HR strategy.

"In the next five to ten years, we expect e-recruitment to grow in popularity among both employers and employees. Most major companies will be using the Internet to advertise their jobs and manage their human capital," says Sentonaris.