Disadvantages of Online Recruiting

Online recruitment or e-recruitment is the new buzzword in business organizations these days and has helped organizations with their recruitment strategies. Online recruiting helps a company to save time and capital, apart from helping them to widen their reach.

Online recruiting has taken off in a big way and there are some organizations that totally rely on e-recruitment to hire new employees. However, there are some challenges associated with e-recruitment, one of the prime challenges being the lack of communication.

• For most part of an online recruitment process, an applicant is not able to speak to any representative from the company. This lack of communication leads to ambiguity and confusion, and can hamper the morale of the applicants.

• It has been often seen that online recruitment draws far too many applications which can prove to be a challenge for the HR managers.

Every organization strives to recruit candidates who can contribute to the company's growth. To achieve this, the HR managers are entrusted with gaging an employee and analyzing whether he can be useful for the company.

However, too many applicants can make it difficult for the managers to choose candidates who are suitable for the job. Going through thousands of resumes can be a very tedious task, and when not done effectively, can hamper the whole screening process.

• There are a lot of specialized jobs that require one-to-one meeting with the candidates, and in these cases, online recruitment can prove to be disadvantageous.

For example, if the company wants to hire someone for a managerial position, it is very important that the candidate is interviewed by specific department heads, as a manager has to be highly skilled. So, online recruitment can prove to be a rather generalized way of recruiting candidates for specialized positions.

• Online recruitment does not take into account the geographical factors that can affect the recruitment process. When a vacancy is posted online, a candidate sitting at any part of the country can apply for the position.

While this helps you to widen your reach, but if you call a candidate to meet you in-person and then he does not turn out to be a suitable match for the position, then you run the risk of losing out on precious time. You also will suffer financially as well as you would have to pay for the expenses that the candidate incurs due to travel and lodging.

• Online recruitment is marred by security issues concerning the Internet and you can easily be vulnerable to spam and fake profiles. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of recruitment through the Internet, as till the candidate does not meet you in person, you are not able to tell if the information that he has provided is authentic or not.

• Online recruitment is also dependent on the quality of your website as if your organization has not taken the pains to design a quality website, there is a high possibility that the candidates will not even bother responding to your notification.

• Online recruiting can lead to many dissatisfied applicants which can affect the image of your organization. The reason for this is that most emails that HR managers send to applicants who are not selected are curt, and fail to tell the precise reason as to why the applicant was rejected.

This can cause the candidate to develop an ill-will against the organization which can hamper the image of the company through word-of-mouth.

It is important to remember that online recruiting has may benefits as well as it is one of the most affordable ways of getting individuals to apply with your organization apart from saving time and resources. If online marketing is used effectively and strategically, it can turn out to be an advantageous way of recruitment.