Advantages And Disadvantages Of Erecruitment Systems

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

One of the key functions of an organization is Human Resource Management. We can see it as an ‘umbrella’ under which other activities occur.

“Sometimes called "Personnel" or "Talent Management," HR is the function in charge of an organization's employees, which includes finding and hiring employees, helping them grow and learn in the organization, and managing the process when an employee leaves. Human Resources take care of people from the time they're interested in the organization to long after they leave.” 1 (University of North Carolina Wilmington)

The main purpose of HR is:

Hiring (including recruiting candidates, the interview process, negotiations, and signing contracts)

Employee benefits

Training and continued professional development

Employee appraisals

Promotions and raises

Warnings and layoffs

The Human Resource manager has got many tasks to perform and one of the major tasks is the recruitment of employees for the organization. The HR Manger must be certain that the proper candidate with the best qualifications and meeting all the required criteria for the vacant job has been appointed.

With the advent of information technology and the Internet, E-Recruitment has taken birth whereby people across the world can finger or submit their application but can even be interviewed online.

Nowadays, e-recruitment is of great importance to many organizations. This system has helped organizations to reduce not only on costs but make it much simple to post on their adverts for vacancies and receiving applications within fraction of seconds.

E-Recruitment

“Recruitment is described as “the set of activities and processes used to legally obtain a sufficient number of qualified people at the right place and time so that the people and the organisation can select each other in their own best short and long term interests”.2

(MANAGING/EFFECTING THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS by Margaret A. Richardson)

Indeed it is a very cumbersome task to discover, make out and select the potential candidate that gratifies both the job description and requirement.

Long ago, people used to send application letters along with their resume to companies by post. Today this process is made at a much faster pace by using web recruitment. The life of the HR Manger has been easier. Job seekers get instance access to employment sites where they can apply for jobs that suit their profile and their applications are processed swiftly. The applicants are furthermore alerted whether they have been selected or not. Very often, the interviewees’ curriculum vitae are kept in the company’s database so that they can be informed when there are works available that suit their competence. This system which is at low cost has bridge the gap between the employers and employees.

Advantages and Disadvantages of E-Recruitment Systems

Advantages

With the availability of the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week businesses are very much enthusiastic to choose online recruitment to hire potential employees. The following summaries some of the vital benefits, clustering around six themes.

Global Reach

Most probably this is one of the main reasons that many companies have chosen E-Recruitment. With this system you reach a wide range of job seekers across the globe. The larger number of people applying for a post, the higher the probability of finding the most eligible candidate.

Cost-Effective

Unlike the traditional methods of advertising vacancy such as newspapers whereby a small advert with limited amount of information provided and reaching only a small audience, web recruitment allows companies to give wealthier information to job seekers and allow them to apply online straight away.

Faster Processing

The Internet accelerates the front end of the recruitment process. The time to employ candidates is greatly reduced by posting vacancies online and the ease of filling in application forms and CV’s is also increased. Unlike traditional methods applications are now processed at a very faster pace saving the businesses and applicants valuable time. The selection of candidates is done almost immediately and candidates get their reply by mails.

Building a Talent Pool of candidates

Retaining speculative and star candidates for the future, and then contacting them when an appropriate vacancy is advertised â€" effectively generating applicants for free.

Easier Access

Basically, many copies CV’s in an organization would mean more paperwork and the need for more storage space. With e-recruitment, CV's are available 24/7 online and do not occupy office space. This ensures the whole decision process is correct when selecting new employees since there is an easy flow of information.

Better Quality Service

Applicants received a much higher quality of service, ranging from prompt and timely communications through to the ability to select their own interview time through an online interview zone all of which enhances the employer's brand making it easier in the long term to attract staff.

Disadvantages

Using such a computerized process may sometimes be challenging for an organization especially when tremendous amount of applications are being received. The following describes some drawbacks of web recruitment.

High Volume of Responses

The internet being accessible to almost everybody, it is rather hard to limit the number of applicants. Very often organizations may be flooded with applications form incompetent candidates. In order to alleviate this problem, businesses need to be very specific and provide full information as far as possible to obtain the right person.

Additional Expense

If a number of vacancies have been published by an organization online, it may require more than one staff to perform the screening processes. Moreover, since the system is global it may be the case that businesses find that the appropriate candidate is at another part of the world. The expense of getting the candidate for an interview may be exorbitant and sometime it may happen that this candidate will not suit the organization’s requirements.

Personal Touch

With online recruitment being more a processing factory, there is a threat that employers lose the personal touch which may discourage certain applicants. Furthermore, we can only have an idea of a candidate’s qualifications when recruiting on web but we still fail to notice his personality or mind-set without face-to-face communication.

Software Investigation

Before going online for recruitments, it is a very vital for an organization to settle on which platform will best suits its business requirements. The following discusses some of the main web framework applications that can be used for a business to perform web recruiting.

Drupal

Drupal is an open-source web platform and is a free framework for creating, organizing, presenting and managing a website. It contains features common to Content Management Systems which allow content of a website to be modified, published or edited.

It can support a number of features like file upload, forums and also it we can add new features because of this plug-in extensibility. Drupal runs on any computing platform that hold ups both a web server capable of running PHP (including Apache) and a database (such as MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server) to store content and settings.

Who uses Drupal?

The White House

Foreign Affairs

Yahoo Research

NASA

Popular Science

Benefits of Drupal?

Reliable & Secure

Drupal is constantly being improved and is subject to extensive testing. It has been proven to prevent common security vulnerabilities such as those defined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).

Open

Drupal was released as open-source software under the GNU Public License which means it can be completely free to download, use, and modify: There is no purchase or license.

Creative content

It manages content with an easy-to-use web interface and handles many content types including video, text, blog, podcasts, and polls with menu handling, real-time statistics.

Administer

Drupal comes up with many great options for new user accounts and user permissions. Users can be assigned one or more roles, and each role can be set up with fine-grained permissions allowing users view and create only what the administrator permits.

Limitations of Drupal?

Backwards Compatibility

Since Drupal is a relatively new system, it is not backwards compatible with other software.

Performance

In terms of loading and scalability Drupal is one stroke behind that of WordPress. The slow loading is simply because of the amount of tools and capabilities.

Joomla

Joomla is a free and open source content management system (CMS) which enables for building Web sites and powerful online applications. It is composed of a platform and extensions which help to extend the Joomla websites’ ability.

Who uses Joomla?

MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking)

IHOP (Restaurant chain)

Harvard University (Educational) Citibank (Financial institution intranet)

The Green Maven (Eco-resources)

Benefits of Joomla

Opensource

Joomla is an opensource so its license is available free of cost. We can get source code free of cost and use and reuse it as per your needs. This way it saves initial investment and totally reduce project cost.

Easy Migration

Joomla CMS development can be easily migrated to any server and most of them can work with any database.

PHP

As Joomla framework is completely written in PHP scripting and it is the most common scripting language used on web pages, websites should display well and we should have limited compatibility issues. We have also preview modes to check the display.

Limitations of Joomla

Resources

The system and sites can use a large amount of server resources comparable to other CMS solutions, which means only a couple of sites could be run successfully and may experience slow loading times.

Compatibility

Compatibility problems occur when installing several modules, extensions and plugins simultaneously.

Security

Every site in Joomla will use its own login details which makes the work easier but the site less secure.

WordPress

WordPress is a free web software that anyone can use to create and update a web-site. We can install WordPress on web-server (or hosting account) and then use the user interface to create pages, upload images. Most importantly we can manage an entire website without any technical knowledge since everything is done from the admin panel where only authenticated users can access and modify your website.

Benefits of WordPress

Themes

It’s indisputably easy to develop a WordPress website, especially as many themes can simply and easily be plugged in with the click of a button.

Plug-in

In Wordpress lots of plug-in available to have a nice looking site with lots of features.

Pods CMS

This plug-in allows you to create and manage different content types without using custom fields.

Open

It’s free and insanely easy to install, use and develop.

Limitations of WordPress

PHP Security

Unfortunately the PHP security for WP has a bad track record and security isn’t as strong as some of the other platforms. This factor must be considered according to the sensitivity of the content of the site.

Too Many Plug-ins

WP needs a lot of plug-ins to be able to do the things that Joomla and Drupal can do out of the box. While the plug-ins are available they can slow page down if we install too many of them.

Tables and Graphics

Modifying and formatting tables and graphic images are more difficult in WP than in its competitors.

Existing E-Recruitment Systems

Jobtrain Solutions

Jobtrain Solutions deliver and support flexible, easy-to-use internet based e-recruitment software/applicant tracking systems to companies of all sizes and across all sectors. They enable their clients to take full control of each stage of the recruitment process and manage their hiring online to save time and money and improve hiring performance, as well as enhancing the candidate experience. They have combined their expertise in HR and technology to provide industry-leading solutions that use the latest technologies whilst placing the focus firmly on people.

RecruitActive

RecruitActive is an innovative and flexible company which provides powerful yet easy to use e-recruitment systems to a range of large & small private sector companies and public sector organisations. The RecruitActive system allows employers to take advantage of the latest online recruitment developments, helping them manage all stages of the recruitment process, from initial vacancy approval through the offer generation and referencing. Applicants can be filtered to that the focus is on the most suitable candidates from all sources â€" internal, external, agency, referrals etc. Online recruitment has been proven to help employers to reduce time to hire, reduce cost per hire and improve the candidate experience with greater efficiency.

PhoenixATS

PhoenixATS is a fully hosted and supported recruitment management system that can be linked to your website creating a powerful and dynamic careers portal. It is a seamless exchange between your site and PhoenixATS with the look and feel as if it is the same site. Utilising cloud computing and a software as a service model, PhoenixATS is carefree and simple to access for all users from anywhere at anytime as long as you have internet access. Through dynamic online system templates you are in control and able to manage your own form content including registrations and application forms, workflows and applicant tracking, communication management and site job board. PhoenixATS is suitable for companies of all sizes and recruitment levels offering a superior selection of online functionality with access to supplementary modules and third party software products. It will assist you in streamlining your online recruitment processes and will create a tool to attract, inform, capture and manage potential employees.