The use of online recruitment methods is now widespread among UK organisations,
but has not dominated the recruitment market in the way that was predicted by the
popular media. This may be because organisations experience mixed success in
using online methods of recruitment. This article reports on the use of a large-scale,
longitudinal survey of recruitment activity to investigate the usage and perceived
success of both corporate and commercial web sites by employers. In addition, 20
interviews with users and providers of online recruitment were conducted in order
to provide a deeper exploration of the factors that may affect the success of these
methods. The results provide valuable insights into the use and success of online
recruitment in the UK and have strong implications for practitioners.
the Internet first emerged as a recruiting tool in the mid-1990s and was
hailed in the popular management press as the driver behind a ‘recruiting
revolution’ because of the benefits it could bring to recruiters (Boydell,
2002). Indeed, some authors suggested that the Internet had ‘revolutionised the
way that people look for work’ (Birchfield, 2002) and brought ‘radical change to
corporate recruiting’ (Cappelli, 2001). There has been little empirical research to
investigate whether these predictions have been realised, despite extensive use of
the methods. We will examine the use of online recruitment and perceptions of its
success in comparison with other methods in the UK by the year 2006 through
our longitudinal data set and interviews. We will then analyse our data to
discover whether the successful use of online recruitment is limited to particular
types of organisations or whether its success is determined by how employers use
online recruitment systems.
Recruitment ‘includes those practices and activities carried out by the organisation
with the primary purpose of identifying and attracting potential employees’
(Breaugh and Starke, 2000: 405) and has long been regarded as an important part of
HRM as it ‘performs the essential function of drawing an important resource –
human capital – into the organisation’ (Barber, 1998: 841). The strategic significance
of recruitment is often reported in the literature (Boxall and Purcell, 2003), the
emphasis being on the need to attract and retain high-quality people in order to gaina competitive advantage, as is consistent with the resource-based view (Barney, 1991;
Wright and McMahon, 1992; Barney and Wright, 1998).
Labour market shortages and recruitment difficulties have led to a more
competitive recruitment market in the last decade. Lievens et al. (2002) asserted that
the ‘war for talent’ meant that the emphasis in organisations moved from the
selection to the attraction of employees. Indeed, the Chartered Institute of Personnel
and Development (CIPD) (2007) reported that 84 per cent of organisations
experienced recruitment difficulties, indicating the continuing tight labour market
conditions and the need to choose appropriate ways to access labour markets. The
already extensive range of recruitment techniques available to organisations has
been augmented further with the development of technologies such as Internet
recruitment.
The use of online recruitment has grown rapidly over the past 10 years, and the
Internet is now a widely adopted medium by both recruiters and job seekers within
the UK and across the world. Arthur (2001) found that 96 per cent of US companies
were online, with spending on electronic advertising expected to rise from $48 million
in 2001 to $460 million by 2006.More recently, Cober and Brown (2006) found that 50
per cent of new hires in the USA were from online sources. In the UK, online
recruitment has become popular for both organisations and candidates. For instance,
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