NO economy can grow at the desired speed in this age of the Internet and other technologies without the use of electronic channels such as e-business, e-marketing, e-learning and the like. Virtually all aspects of business is done online these days. So, job search and recruitment cannot be an exception. To this end, a new platform, e-recruitment, has entered the labour market.
e-recruitment is the use of the Internet to identify and attract potential employees. It encompasses everything, from website or career portal, the job boards’ employers and employees use to receive registration and applications via the web, through to the management of the recruitment process.
Right now, e-recruitment is the big online revolution in the market of employers and opportunity seeking employees.
Taking advantage of this, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) has launched an online portal for jobs in accountancy and business. Its President, Prof Francis Ojaide, said the job portal is part of the commitment of the institute to equip members with the tools to help them succeed.
With the job portal, Ojaide said the institute aimed to support accountants’ professional development by connecting them to a wide array of career opportunities.
Likely to feature on the site are multi-national companies, government agencies and recruitment firms.
He said the job portal provides an easy way to search and apply for vacancies in the accounting industry.
ICAN’s portal allows for the submission and updating of applications, personal details and qualification on-line, anywhere and anytime. Interestingly, notification to applicants is sent immediately via e-mail and/or Short Messaging Service (SMS).
By using this system, accountants can search for jobs within the industry.
Experts believe e-recruitment helps organisations to reach target audience and recruit qualified candidates. Similarly, it allows employers to broaden the scope of their search, thus, enhancing the chances of recruiting quality candidates.
The Chairman, Membership Affairs Committee, Chidi Ajaegu said the initiative started in 2006 with the manual collection of members’ resume and giving same to prospective employers upon request.
Ajaegu said the council approved an e-recruitment portal to make it easy for members to upload their resumes from the comfort of their homes and, at the same time, allow prospective employers or their agents search for qualified chartered accountants without recourse to the institute in 2009. The beauty of the portal, he said, is that it will make the institute the first port of call when chartered accountants are required.
“The job portal will be used to unite employers and prospective candidates by bridging the existing gap of reach,”Ajaegu said.
He said members can search and apply for jobs online, as well as subscribe to email notifications for jobs they are interested in.
He said: “Registered members can deposit their CVs and manage their profiles online anytime, enabling potential employers to seek them out. To make it easier for members to focus on their preferred positions, job vacancies are categorised, according to areas of specialisation, including accountancy and finance, banking and financial services and practice.”
The Managing Consultant of Projektlink Konsult Ltd, Mr Adetunji Adepeju, said the site will help employers who have decided to move their recruiting efforts online. He said the institute collects, processes and analyses all resumes for employers.
Adepeju, a member of ICAN’s Membership Affairs Committee, said the institute will respond to applications received through its website via SMS. With the portal, he said accounting job seekers will have greater and flexible access for jobs while the employers have greater access to talents for their organisations.
Adepeju said the portal is established to provide well-educated accountants the opportunity to connect with employers.
Rising trend of online job search signals the need for organisations and candidates to maximise web technologies to improve search for the right person for the right job.
Speaking with The Nation, a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria (CIPM) and personnel consultant, Dr Peter Kudaisi, said the recruitment industry is richer and more varied thanks to digital technologies and the Internet.
According to him, e-recruitment provides Human Resources departments with faster access to candidate profiles and a broader search.
For him, the technology has levelled the playing field in the job market for companies with large and small recruitment budgets. Organisations with lesser resources can turn to online platforms to communicate their job openings more easily at a much lower or even at no cost.
Companies now post vacancies’adverts at relevant sites to get the attention of prospective candidates. They then use appropriate software such as candidate-matching or filtering tools to handle the massive volume of submissions.
While more recruitment activities are moving online, Kudaisi and his colleagues still use traditional platforms such as newspapers to play a major role to online media.
Most companies, such as KPMG, Accenture and SAP, involved in e-recruitment now acquire special software. This enables them to intelligently match suitable candidates from their own database.
With a cleverly automated recruitment system, responses from job boards are imported with all data and skills automatically extracted and applicants ranked based on their skill match.
This enables them to identify the most suitable candidates, speeding up short-listing process significantly.
Kudaisi said the impact of online recruitment is huge and unprecedented. Because of this, online job sites have gained popularity and won job seeker’s trust in no time.
He said online recruitment plays a vital role in getting people on board, according to the organisation’s required set skill and educational demands.
Kudaisi said the Internet has completely revolutionised the role of the traditional recruiter. Recruiters now search through hundreds of thousands of CV’s placed on personal web pages and browse online corporate staff directories.
He said e-recruitment has helped to reduce favouritism, which is common in physical recruitment exercise.
However, he maintained that candidates short-listed from the e-recruitment process still need to see their prospective employers face to face. Presently, e- recruitment has been adopted in large organisations and small companies.
The real strength and power of online recruitment, when executed properly, he said lies in harnessing Internet technology to not just attract candidates but to deal with them too. In this sense, it is also about streamlining the recruitment process, freeing up more of Human Resources (HR) time for more value-added tasks.
Across the industry, practitioners considering introducing online recruiting and e-recruitment systems feel apprehensive about using e-recruitment to hire top management staff.
For this reason, some companies continue to use more traditional recruitment services for hiring executive level staff. Kudaisi said job portals are not suitable for recruiting top management. He said some positions are better sourced using a newspaper or using newspaper and website advertisement. According to him, the position of chief executive is so critical to the success of an organisation.
“Besides written tests CEOs need to go through stress test to ascertain their ability to withstand the pressure of corporate management.” This, he said, e-recruitment will not reveal.
Kudaisi said recruiters need to interact with prospective CEOs. Such interaction, he said, will reveal the quality of candidates, experience, building desire and motivation to work for the organisation.
According to him, the growth of the company is dependent on the quality of the CEO.
Companies deploying e-recruiting utilise a broad range of electronic means in their recruitment practices.
The e-recruiting process consists of three major steps: attracting, sorting, and contacting candidates. The first step involves tracking potential candidates on the Internet and in on-line databases. The next step – sorting – involves the screening of candidates. The third step, contacting candidates.
e-recruitment systems are a big help, since they enable communication tasks to be automated.
On the balance, the job portal can reach people at a worldwide level while newspapers can reach people only at a local level. Companies achieve cost savings in three areas; reduced direct costs of newspaper advertisements, job fairs and head hunter fees, reduced mailing cost and reduced workload for the HR department. Also, in terms of time saving, e-recruitment can help companies achieve faster recruiting cycle.
There are three results: faster posting jobs on the Internet; once a job is posted the HR department starts receiving resumes the same day and the Internet can speed up the processing period by automating some tasks. Other issues that relate to e-recruitment is the risk of overload of resumes as the Internet makes it easier for applicants to submit their resumes and it removes all barriers of time and geography in communication between employers and applicants. As a result, it could create a huge volume of unqualified candidates.
Across the industry, concern about e-recruiting system is about lack of personalised response to applicants that are rejected. Applicants want to receive an explanation why they were not hired, instead of just being rejected through the e-recruitment system.
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Source: The Nation
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