A click away: You can now look for jobs on the web

There is no mistaking the most striking trend in recruitment advertising in recent years — the rise of job advertising online.

While local newspapers are still the most common medium, more than seven out of 10 organisations now also advertise vacancies on their websites and require applications to be made online, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s (CIPD) 2006 survey shows.

Since the 2005 survey, the use of local papers for job advertising has fallen from 85 per cent to 79 per cent, with national papers from 55 per cent to 45 per cent and recruitment agencies from 80 per cent to 76 per cent. The use of corporate websites has risen from 67 per cent to 75 per cent.

“The rise in online recruitment has been exponential,” said Wendy Trollope, of the Online Recruitment Marketing Council. “One of its biggest advantages is convenience. People have access to the Internet at home and don’t have to wait for a paper to come out on a particular day to look for a job and they can also set up searches that allow new postings to be e-mailed to them.”

Hard cash confirms the online trend. In Britain, Internet advertising — of which recruitment is one of the largest components — is now worth almost half as much as television advertising. Almost £1 billion was spent on Internet advertising in the first six months of 2006, 40 per cent more than the year before, according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau, the World Advertising Research Centre and PriceWaterhouse Coopers, the accountancy firm. Online advertising is poised to overtake press advertising.

The driving force behind the rise of e-recruitment, according to 71 per cent of employers in the latest CIPD survey, is that it costs less. However, the rapid acquisition of broadband is also driving the change — 10 million homes now have it.

The old arguments against online recruitment centred on a lack of access to computers and age, older people, it was said, would be less familiar with online technology and be at a disadvantage.

“A lot of people say age is a barrier,” said Trollope. “But I’m 50 and I know a lot of people my age and older, and the Internet is no problem. What’s certain, according to David Hurst (her chairman), is that nobody under 30 would use anything other than the Internet to look for a job.”

According to Angela Barron, a CIPD adviser, cost and convenience mean online recruitment is here to stay. But there is one disadvantage — the large number of unsuitable applications that come in because it is so easy to apply online. Barron said the real concerns, however, centred not on the process of placing an ad online but on candidate-selection methods.

“I have concerns about screening techniques such as the use of key words to reject candidates,” she said, explaining how a company might, for example, reject applicants for a finance officer’s post if those exact words did not figure in their CVs.

“If an organisation wants to be competitive and to have human capital to invest in, then it has to recruit on the basis of potential,” she said. “The lazy way to recruit is to find someone who for the past five years has been doing the same specific job as the one advertised.”

Barron also has worries about online psychometric and ability testing. For a start, it’s not certain who is taking the tests when they are completed online. There are reports, for example, of groups of graduates working together on online ability tests. This practice came under suspicion after an impossibly high number of candidates appeared at the top end of the performance scale.

Interestingly, the 2006 CIPD survey shows 84 per cent of organisations prefer not to use self-selection questionnaires and 74 per cent dislike online testing.

Some jobseekers argue that e-recruitment is cold and dehumanising. Graduates, in particular, have complained about spending hours on online applications in their final year at university only for an employer to bounce their application right back with a line saying that this particular job search has already closed. For the most popular posts, a job search can close only hours after an ad is posted. Others have complained that they never get any feedback when an application fails.

Trollope rejects the allegations that e-recruitment is “cold” and impersonal. “That’s like saying that a newspaper ad is cold,” she said. She believes that the rise in the number of graduates, and the greater competition that has produced for jobs, is mistakenly being blamed on e-recruitment.

She argues that online recruitment has too many benefits not to continue to flourish and challenge more established recruitment tools. She points to the latest online recruitment development — the financial incentives some employers are offering to people who refer friends and colleagues to them.

“Commission”, from a few hundred to tens of thousands of pounds, is being offered to those whose referrals lead to a post being filled. Recruitment consultants may be about to feel e-recruitment breathing even harder down their necks.