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and success in finding
candidates (51 per cent). Less common reasons were ease of use for the organisation
(45 per cent), keeping ahead of competitors (24 per cent) and company policy (10 per
cent).
The interviewees who used online recruitment gave a number of reasons for their
adoption of these methods. The majority of interviewees named the need to reduce
recruitment costs and to improve the efficiency of the recruitment process as
significant drivers for the adoption of both corporate and commercial web sites. This
is in support of the survey data. About half of the interviewees also suggested that
they were encouraged to adopt online recruitment by the need to “move with the
times” or to “keep up with other organisations”, and approximately a third of
interviewees stated that they had introduced online recruitment in order to improve
the experience for applicants.
Table 2 shows that the perceived success of both corporate and commercial web
sites for recruitment had fluctuated over the six years of this study, but had increased
slightly overall during this time. In fact, the perceived success of all of the methods
examined had increased slightly during this period. This may be a sign that
recruiters were being more strategic in their choice of recruitment channels to use to
be successful for particular roles. Just under a quarter of those organisations using
corporate web sites and two-thirds of those using commercial web sites for
recruitment in Q2 2006 found the method successful, indicating that most of those
organisations that do use the method perceive that they do so successfully. If we
compare the perceived success of corporate and commercial web sites with other
recruitment channels, we can see that online methods are certainly not seen as more
successful than these, and are commonly perceived as less successful than
employment agencies.
The interviewees’ experiences of the success of online recruitment were mixed.
When asked to define how they conceptualised the success of online recruitment, the
majority of interviewees described success as generating sufficient shortlistable
candidates or as enabling them to fill a vacancy. A number of interviewees had
managed to attract good-quality applicants through using the Internet, but this was
not true for everyone.
Those interviewees who had positive experiences of online recruitment described
how the use of either corporate web sites or commercial jobs boards could minimise
the time taken to hire employees because posting advertisements on the Internet is
faster and they are no longer reliant on the mail. Online recruitment was also
commonly described as saving costs through reducing paper and saving on agency
costs. One interviewee described how, before they started to use their corporate web
site for recruitment, they were heavily dependent on agencies and other third-party
recruiters. A number of interviewees also commented that the use of their corporate
Emma Parry and Shaun Tyson
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 18 NO 3, 2008 263
© 2008 The Authors.
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
TABLE 2 Perceived success of online recruitment compared with other recruitment methods
Corporate
web site
(%)
Commercial
web site (%)
National
newspapers
(%)
Regional
newspapers
(%)
Professional