In 2000, a survey by the UK research company BMRB found that searching for
jobs was the fourth most common use of the internet in the UK, behind
e-mail, shopping and booking travel or holidays. That was in 2000. It is
becoming even more common. A survey by Ilogos, another research firm,
found that 91 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use their own websites for
recruiting, up from 79 per cent in 2000 and 57 per cent in 1998.
There is no doubt that the internet has changed the way candidates look
for and apply for jobs. Companies, too, have adapted to the medium and
increasingly expect to advertise jobs online and receive online
applications. Online recruitment is now even more popular than internet
shopping and e-banking.
All the same, plenty of recruitment sites have gone out of business in the
past year, including financial services sites fincareer.com and
onvocation.com. Others appear to be struggling, including Futurestep,
owned by global search firm Korn/Ferry, which is mainly a CV collector
rather than a jobs board.
Views on the role of the internet in recruitment have totally changed
since the first online recruitment sites set up only a few years ago. In
fact, a more topical question in 2003 might actually be is there such a
separate concept as "online recruitment" or is it now just one integrated
channel within the whole recruitment mix? At the most recent Recruitment
Society Internet debate the speakers may not have quite reached that
point, but they did start from the question of "is the internet
fundamentally changing the relationship between the client and the
recruitment company?"
As with many online concepts, pundits originally used their favourite word
of the dotcom era - 'disintermediation', about the effect online
recruitment might have on more traditional recruitment methods. Clearly
that has not happened. The fears that online recruitment was the beginning
of the end for recruitment advertising revenue have proved false. Online
and traditional methods cohabit the recruitment arena, hopefully improving
the general offering.
However, the Internet has had an impact on recruitment advertising. There
is no doubt of the impact if we look at the American newspaper market
where newspapers have bought control of one of the top 3 online
recruitment sites, Careerbuilder, to stem the tide of lost revenues. This
suggests that we may see a similar strategy in the UK.
There are also those who argue that personality - not technology - still
rules and that emotion must be put back into the process of recruiting.
Certainly, the internet can be personalised to meet individual needs, but
it cannot replace communication between candidate and company.
What becomes apparent is that the candidate and client cry for more, not
less, personal contact and consideration is now louder than ever. In a
market where there are fewer job opportunities (online or in print!) more
candidates, and where thanks to email it is easier than ever for an
individual, if so minded, to use "spray and pray" applications, the
limitations of the medium are self-evident.
Finally, the perception that online job-hunting does not work for senior
jobs is fading and that there are many well-paid jobs advertised nowadays.
No doubt, we will get a clearer idea how successfully online job hunting
works when the economy picks up and more firms start hiring.