Competition for talent has become more intense in recent years. There are plenty of companies that provide an incredible work-life balance, competitive salaries, ample growth opportunities, and superior benefits. This makes standing out to potential talent in any way possible crucial.
Whether you’re trying to optimize your recruiting system or you want to expand your reach, incorporating digital recruitment into your company is the best way to put yourself ahead of others and bring in the best talent possible.
What is digital recruitment? How did it come about? Can anyone use it? And how will it benefit you? This blog covers everything you need to know about digital recruitment and how you can make it work to your benefit.
What Is Digital Recruitment?
Digital recruitment is the hiring process that involves the use of specific web tools in order to find the perfect candidate and recruit them. Using digital recruitment will be beneficial to your company because it allows you to find candidates from different locations, expanding your hiring pool.
With digital recruitment, all of your hiring efforts will be made online through tools such as social media platforms, mobile apps, and online job boards. There’s no shortage of methods that can be used to recruit candidates digitally, which are usually chosen by hiring managers based on the company’s capabilities and resources. Using software that automates hiring or categorizing qualified candidates and social media recruitment are a few of the popular techniques.
If you’re looking for a way to make your digital recruitment even more attractive, you can find some tips here.
History of Digital Recruitment
The days of walking into a digital marketing company in Reno (Vegas, Henderson) and physically handing them your resume have passed. Recruitment has evolved for the better.
Digital recruitment had humble beginnings in the late 1990s, with job boards as a way to sway attention from newspapers and other print media. Craigslist, Monster, and CareerBuilder were paramount in the revolutionization of the way jobs were advertised and searched for. Despite the constant improvements to the hiring process, job boards still make up over 10% of hires in America.
The rise of social media in the mid-2000s forced recruiters to once again change their approach to hiring new employees. Potential talent was divided into two categories, active and passive candidates. Job boards became the place to be for candidates actively seeking new jobs, but the traffic to various job boards was limited by how much they could buy. Then, because it seemed easier, Indeed started to aggregate ads from other websites, which introduced “pay-per-click” job advertising. This led to job aggregation taking over as the leading recruitment model.
It wasn’t until LinkedIn entered the scene that there was a significant shift in the hiring process. The ability to search for profiles of passive candidates through profile data further expanded the pool of talent that hiring managers could choose from. Due to “propriety” databases in the past, recruiters held a certain level of power over employers. This new process eliminated that power, and candidate data became available to anyone with the right tools and skills.
Inspired by applications such as Yelp and Expedia, Glassdoor took digital recruitment a step further by adding company reviews to the job seekers’ arsenal. Their unique web design pushed their growth through the roof, with nearly 50% of American job seekers using Glassdoor during their job hunt.
Benefits of Digital Recruitment
- Better candidates: By using online recruitment, you can expand your horizons and reach a larger pool of potential applicants. As a result, you will end up hiring more qualified and skilled candidates. The ability to post your vacancies on multiple social media platforms, job boards, and community groups makes people who may have never seen your job posting more likely to apply.
Unlike in the past, digital recruitment gives you the freedom to modify your job posting, update the post when necessary, and remove the ad once you’ve received sufficient applications.
- Saves time: Manually going through resumes to find the best candidates can take a long time. Digital recruiting uses matching technology and keywording in order to post your advertisement to the best job boards and identify the best candidates for your company. By allowing automation to take the reigns, hiring managers can focus their time on more pressing matters and simply review the shortlisted candidates.
- Cost-effective: The manual hiring process can end up costing your company a substantial amount of money. Unnecessary expenses such as advertisement fees and the cost of third-party recruitment companies can all be eliminated by switching to digital recruitment. By posting on job boards and social media, you won’t have to spend a cent while searching for the perfect candidate.
- Automated application process: Curating your job post has never been easier than with an automated application process. Hiring managers can make all the changes they need to a vacancy advertisement without any help from third-party recruiters or IT. Since the majority of job seekers use job boards, this is the easiest place to post your vacancies. Most job boards are incredibly user-friendly for both employers and candidates alike, further adding to the ease of digital recruiting.
- Improved communication: Calling every potential candidate can become tiresome. By moving over to digital recruitment, you can send mass emails to applicants, speeding up the process and saving you time. You can even have applicants send their resumes directly to your email through the job board, allowing you to manage and respond to all applicants on one platform.
Who Can Use Digital Recruitment?
If you’re an expanding company looking to hire talented professionals, then digital recruitment is for you. Finding the candidates that best suit your company is an essential part of a successful business, so you will benefit greatly from investing in a recruitment system. In the long run, a perfectly optimized recruitment system will reel in top talent and remove some of the efforts that go into hiring new employees.
Whether you’re on the hunt for a specific person who can do website design in Reno (Vegas, Henderson) or you want to hire multiple candidates, digital recruitment is the best way to speed up the process, and it allows you to reach candidates who would’ve been impossible to contact by using traditional recruitment methods. Digital recruitment drastically multiplies the results of the hiring process while minimizing the amount of effort put in.
Make your company stand out to job seekers so that whether the job market is overflowing with talent or there is a scarcity of candidates, you can ensure that you’re still able to hire the best and most qualified person for the job.