What are the Advantages of Recruiting on the Web?
Online recruitment is less costly than its print counterpart, averaging 5 percent of the price of placing a help-wanted ad in a major newspaper for thirty days. Cost is based not on the size of the ad, as with print, but either by individual posting or subscription. Online recruitment also generates faster responses from prospective employees, thereby shortening the hiring cycle. With well-written resumes and job postings, screening time can also be cut.
Online recruitment can attract passive job seekers. These are individuals who aren’t job hunting—they are "just looking"—but may pursue a position if it interests them enough. Finally, online recruitment enables companies to have access to the global workforce. This has proven invaluable with hard-to-fill positions.
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Costs for online recruiting can range from $100 to $200 per posting on a site, to $500 per month for ten postings plus access to the resume database, to $100,000 a year for unlimited postings and database access. Some sources offer free trial subscriptions, which enables an organization to assess the site’s traffic and decide if it’s a good investment.
Think $100,000 seems a lot? Compare that cost to what your firm would have to pay for a display ad on a metropolitan newspaper. It could be as high as $2,000 a day, and that single ad might have to run several weeks until sufficient responses were received to identify enough prospects to begin the interview phase.
What’s the downside to recruiting on the Web? Most career sites add listings chronologically. Consequently, your posting can be lost in a mass of other online ads. To find the position you’ve posted, applicants will be forced to scroll down a long list of jobs, even with word-search capability.
And while recruitment via job search sites guarantees a heavy and immediate response, this does not ensure the quality of the responses or the seriousness of their senders. Easy-access resume responses may prompt those browsing the Web site during office downtime, not serious job seekers. The resumes in response to an ad may bury you and the Human Resources Department in replies, but few may meet the requirements you listed in your job posting.
Finally, diversity recruitment efforts may be curtailed since women and minorities tend to have less access to the online recruitment services.