Optimizing Recruitment Online: The Critical Importance of Using the Right Channels

Introduction

In an increasingly fast-changing and complex environment, organizations are faced with new challenges such as looking for new talents in the labor market. And this competition and race to acquire the most skilled and professional workers has led to many changes in the process of recruiting with the aim of making it a more effective and optimized process (Brandão et al, 2019; Grabara et. al, 2016). According to Grabara et al. (2016), a recruitment process is said to be efficient and optimized when the organization hires the person who possesses the required competences for a particular position, in the shortest possible time and with the lowest costs.

With the rapid development of new technologies, e-recruitment has become an important source of recruitment (Rosoiu and Popescu, 2016). The term e-recruitment is used to refer to any recruitment process that is conducted via web-based tools (Kim & O’Connor, 2009) ranging from applicant tracking systems, to the corporate web sites, online job boards, online testing and finally to social network websites (Josimovski et al.,2019).

The most common advantages that are cited in the literature pertaining to the topic of e-recruitment are the time and costs savings that e-recruitment tools generate when they are used by the recruiter as well as the wide and diverse applicant pool the recruiter has access to (Ayshath et al., 2015; Petre et al, 2016; Rosoiu and Popescu, 2016; Bandão et al, 2019; Josimovski et al., 2019). The web has also provided the recruiter with tools that help him or her evaluate more accurately whether or not a candidate is fit for the position he or she applied for, therefore improving the quality of employer-employee matches (Krueger, 2000; Autor, 2001; Mang, 2012; Josimovski et al., 2019).

However, the literature on e-recruitment has also acknowledged the main disadvantages of this digitalized process, whether in terms of the inappropriate or excessive load of applications received or the constant need to update and fine-tune the targeting of the information available on the companies’ corporate websites (Monteiro et al., 2019). Also, and surprisingly, the high costs per applicant, the long time to employment and the increased risks of overlooking qualified candidates were also put forth in the literature as potential drawbacks of the e-recruitment process (Josimovski et al., 2019).

Therefore, this research aims at addressing the apparent lack of consensus in the literature on the efficiency-effectiveness promise of e-recruitment by adding the dimension of the used e-channel. In other words, this paper explores to what extent the e-channel used by a company could alter the efficiency and effectiveness of the recruitment process and, hence, generate a sub-optimal result.

Studies linking the efficiency-effectiveness of the e-recruitment process to the used e-channel are not abundant in the literature. Gonçalves (2018) had pointed out how selecting an inadequate e-channel could lead to an unfeasible recruitment process. The same could be said for Josimovski et al. (2019) who compared the efficiency and effectiveness of three e-recruitment methods, namely Job boards, Facebook job ads and combined social network websites, and concluded on the superiority of the latter.

This research stems from the same rational as it highlights the critical importance of the used e-channels for an efficient and effective e-recruitment process. Moreover, it enriches the literature by showing how companies may use a combination of several e-channels in the aim of taking advantage of their complementarities, hence optimizing the use of e-channels.

The rest of the paper will be structured as follows. After a thorough review of the literature on e-recruitment efficiency, a set of variables or criteria will be selected to assess both the efficiency and effectiveness of e-recruitment. Then, this “evaluation grid” will be tested on thirteen Lebanese companies who have adopted some form of “digitization” of their recruitment process and have used either a single e-channel or a combination of several channels in order to assess their e-recruitment process against the selected efficiency and effectiveness criteria. A discussion of results and final remarks will conclude the paper.