Making e-recruitment work

Companies around the world are fighting a war to attract and retain the best talent. Without the talent, the best business model and the most efficient business processes will ultimately not be enough. The battle is particularly hot here in SA, where the right skills are in short supply - and where competition from international players is growing.

A company's recruitment function is clearly in the frontline. If it does not work effectively, the company will be unable to acquire the skills it needs to compete. In the currently supercharged and highly volatile global business environment, companies also need to be agile; they cannot afford a cumbersome recruitment process, and cost pressure means it cannot be expensive either. Companies need to cultivate the ability to acquire the right skills quickly and cost-effectively, in order to respond to fast-moving customer and market demands.

Traditional recruitment processes are manual, and are proving increasingly unsuitable.

Raymond Myburgh is head of IndigoCube's HR Solutions business unit.

An additional challenge that is particularly relevant in SA is the competition for jobs. Recruiters will all tell stories of how each vacancy attracts hundreds of applications, all of which have to be processed. The sheer weight of numbers - and the unemployment statistics do not suggest things will change anytime soon - greatly increase the administrative burden on recruiters, and greatly reduce their ability to pinpoint the most likely candidates.

Traditional recruitment processes are manual, and are proving increasingly unsuitable from several viewpoints. At the one end of the process, it's hard for non-specialist HR staff to correctly capture the job specifications required by line managers. Depending on the job, these specifications could be quite technical and specific, and often would be hard for the recruiter to come to grips with.

At the other end of the process, as noted above, compiling the best possible shortlist from hundreds of applications is well-nigh impossible, and typically leads to a tick-box approach based on skills, making it likely the shortlist may miss the all-important cultural fit that is the foundation to any successful placement. Technology can help hard-pressed recruiters cut through all the routine administration and processing to develop better shortlists more quickly. By streamlining the process, it can give them more time to spend on the shortlisted candidates.

Here again, technology can play a key role either in placing job ads in traditional media around the world, or more likely, using digital channels for international dissemination.

One solution seemed to be the dedicated job portals, but in my experience, they are only a partial solution. They are themselves inflexible, and their reach is limited to their own sites. And they fail to address the core issue already noted: it's the recruitment process as a whole that needs to be streamlined.

That's where e-recruitment comes in. Because it automates the process, it can help ensure the job specifications are captured effectively by the relevant line manager, and that everything is managed centrally, with no duplication of effort. The job can be advertised via multiple channels, locally and internationally, and responses collated and ranked - online psychometric testing and screening can be built in, for example. The result is better (and even longer) shortlists for detailed consideration, thus increasing the chances of a good fit. E-recruitment can also be configured to ensure candidates are automatically kept abreast of the process, thus removing another pressure point.

Another key advantage of e-recruitment is it enables recruiters to draw management reports much more easily throughout the whole process, ensuring all stakeholders are able to track progress. It's also very easy to track how successful each action the recruiter performs is - in turn, helping to create a recruitment function that is constantly improving.

The end result? Costs, and even more important, time are saved, and the quality and integrity of the process is improved, no matter whether there are large or small volumes of applications. And reporting to management is also made much easier.

So, if e-recruitment is so important to finding the right talent, what makes for a good solution and what are the success factors? I will discuss these and other related issues in my next Industry Insight.