The economics of recruiting online
Just in the way that the record music industry is facing stiff competition from the new born internet music, so is the traditional recruitment industry facing the challenge from the techno geeks.
What was once considered an exclusive domain of the local hiring agencies is now an open ground for invasion. New age internet facilitators are giving these agencies the nightmares of their lifetime. But the question that comes to my mind is why should the recruiter take help of such technology backed companies over the agency model?
By providing instantaneous responses and direct contact with the candidates the internet has transformed the process of hiring employees and has marginalized the profits of many agencies and publications.
Apart from providing accessibility and speed, these companies remove the middleman and effectively save money and time for the recruiters. It also provides the hiring company to present itself in a more professional manner.
The self service automated systems allow the managers, external agencies and candidates to manage their own administrative work and track applications via the web. Hiring is about keeping a track of the good quality manpower over a long period of time and being able to alert everyone on a timely basis when a vacancy arises. Such a candidate relationship management cannot be executed through the paper agency model.
Although these softer benefits are harder to document and quantify, buy still they matter. Speeding up the hiring process not only reduces the overhead costs, it also could mean the difference between hiring a good talent and losing it to the competition.
But not everything is as rosy as it seems prima facie. You might have a good perfect talented candidate for a position. But if no human touch in incorporated in the first filter you might lose that special candidate because he did not mention a particular word in his CV. The result is a good candidate lost because of what he forgot to ink in his CV.
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