Online recruitment has been opening doors to more candidates in the entire recruitment process - which brings many advantages and disadvantages that should be considered when hiring new talent for your business. In this blog, we discuss the pro's and con's of digital hiring in comparison to the traditional 'in-person' approach.
Digital recruitment is a way for businesses and recruiters to use the internet to look through potential candidates, ready to start the recruitment process with those suitable. It gives you the opportunity to post job openings, contact candidates quickly and easy, while letting you set up interviews via video/phone calls - making your hiring process a lot more efficient.
Digital recruitment has played a significant role in the recruitment industry for many years. The technology helps recruiters/hiring teams to gather relevant information and sufficient data that's needed to match applicants to suitable job roles - making the recruitment process easier, more efficient, and cost-effective.
The Advantages - Digital Hiring
Wide Audience Reach - Recruiting digitally allows your business to reach a more targeted wider talent pool. Whether you're recruiting applicants to work remotely or in office - using specific online platforms gives you endless opportunities to be specific with what candidate you're looking for and what industry experience they need.
When using online recruitment, it gives businesses/hiring teams the freedom to expand their job search to source the most qualified candidates, meaning you can go outside of your normal area to reach people globally if necessary. It will also help you to gauge which platforms are best for sourcing the correct candidate for you to use in the future.
Time Saving - Time is effectively money, so online recruitment will provide recruiters and businesses with a faster hiring process, enabling them to interview and shortlist more applicants in a day and having extra time to handle several job openings at the same time.
As well as this, most job posts and replies will appear in real time, which helps a company or recruitment group to increase their efforts to attract candidates, attract a specific type of candidate or to even stop candidates from applying for roles that wouldn't be suitable - as you may have already found the perfect applicant.
The entire process for posting a job advertisement has been made extremely easy and user-friendly as almost anyone can post a job advertisement but not only for employers, it's also made it extremely easy to apply for the roles you see online - making the whole process more effective for everyone.
Cost Effective - Being cost effective is always a massive advantage in any scenario and taking on the digital hiring approach will bring this benefit to your company. When posting a job advertisement on a platform, you usually have the opportunity to pay for as much or as little exposure as you would like, depending on how much you're willing to spend.
If you decide to manage your campaign, you effectively save plenty of money while attracting the applicants who are the perfect fit for the vacancy you're advertising for.
Better Candidate Evaluation - Another digital hiring advantage is that you can evaluate your candidates in greater detail before getting to the in-person or online interview stage. AI solutions and digital tools help to screen applications a lot faster with the use of filtering options - once that stage is complete, there are plenty of assessment tools available that you could use with the shortlisted candidates.
If you want to add more value to your candidate assessment stage, you can simply suggest video presentations for an applicant to submit - this gives you the opportunity to determine whether they could be a potential fit for the role before making it to the official interview.
The Disadvantages - Digital Hiring
Less Personal - One of the main disadvantages that the digital approach has is that it can become less personal. Communicating online can end up painting a completely different picture of a candidate than if you had met them in person and can also come across as informal. If you're going to communicate online, you need to make sure that you and the candidate are both on the same page.
Less Behavioural Assessment - For the companies who don't require examinations, a lot of the recruitment process is done online. Phone and video call interviews tend to be commonly practiced and for some cases, employers and recruiters will not be able to guarantee the professional ethics of a candidate, especially for specific situations and certain working environments - meaning you won't always be able to work out how suitable a candidate may be until the official interview.
More Competition - One of the main disadvantages to the digital hiring approach is that everyone else is doing the same thing - creating a lot of competition. Your job posts/applications can quickly become buried under the amount of other job offers and opportunities, which can force you, as the employer, to either pay more for extra exposure or the risk of not being seen.
You can also get caught up in the social media algorithm trap, created by the likes of Facebook - meaning you can try to target a specific audience but it's essentially down to the hands of somebody else as to whether your post gains the attraction you want.
Ghosting - A lot of employers have said that one of their top digital recruiting challenges is in fact being "ghosted" by candidates who either don't show up for interviews or don't respond to the initial communication.
This is quite common as the current market gives job seekers more freedom in choosing the opportunities to pursue and when. Candidates may not realise the impact that this actually causes as it becomes frustrating, wastes valuable resources, and can set back the hiring timeline.
Can Attract (More) Less Suitable Candidates - Since digital recruitment can generate a large number of applicants per day, companies should definitely consider this as it can delay the process. Recruiters should ensure the efficiency at all times to avoid tapping unqualified candidates as well as candidates that aren't suitable location wise.
There's definitely many benefits to hiring digitally, whether that's to save time, having a wider talent pool or to have a better candidate evaluation - so it's clear to see that the digital hiring approach is definitely here to stay as more employers and agencies take it on and even combine the two different approaches to benefit a company.
Here at Talented Recruitment Group, we're completely for the digital hiring approach as we see the benefits during our recruitment process. What do you think?