Throughout this succinct article we will discuss the practices of professional recruitment, addressing its history, processes, practices and the future, but with a greater focus on e-recruitment, is the use of the Internet as a tool in recruitment.
Recruitment
The only similarity between recruitment and selection is that both are responsible for seeking and evaluating people who have a profile and competencies that best meet the needs of a specific vacancy within a company, when these two words are together many people confuse, but the concepts are different.
In recruitment is used techniques and procedures that aims to attract candidates with the best profile for the company, while the selection takes place after the recruitment process, where the selection of the most interesting and performed the filtration, after this is done a more detailed analysis to select the most apt professional for the job.
As for the recruitment process we can define it as the needs of the company, there are several means to perform the recruitment and some authors differentiate only by the nomenclature and the division of the means, the most common and self explanatory are the needs analysis prospect of candidates, screening of curricula, interviews, tests and technical proofs, selection interview, data verification, communication of the company's choice, and it is important that these stages of the recruitment process be followed correctly so that they achieve success and are guaranteed the best candidates to the available vacancy.
According to Harvard Business Review (1999, p. 109), the first recruitment in history happened in China, during the Dynasty Han. The employees made a long 1 and detailed description of the role to public functionaries, yet it didn't work so well - few conditions were satisfactory.
Then, a way that was often used for the organizations was to utilize newspaper ads. The institution put some announcements on the newspaper, explaining what was the role and when would be the interview. After years, things changed with the evolution of the technology, the newspapers stopped to be a good carrier of news, the internet took its place. So, since the newspaper ads wasn't an option anymore, the organizations had to evolve the methods of hiring employees.
Many businessmen noticed that the Human Resources wasn't efficient enough to hire people, so they had a brilliant idea, to begin an institution that would be engaged to engage people for others institutions - the called recruitment companies. Talking about methods now, there's the online tests, the video interviews, the smart recruitment and the artificial intelligence. On the first one, the company send a password on a website to the candidates - it's a form to taper the participants to the interview in person. On the second, it also happen when the interviewed is not available to do it personally, so the technology solve the problem.
On the third, it's necessary a software that will analyzes the interviews (specifically the voice tone of the participant) and it's being increasingly used, because it's faster and easier. The last method, the artificial intelligence, is utilized to find "the perfect person to the perfect job"; in other words, it will look for people on the social network to one specifically job and when the IA finds them, it sends an invitation to an interview for the work. The recruitment practices are different depending on the size of the organization, mainly because of the costs. The small firms cannot afford for a more elaborate recruitment processes so they use mostly network connections and referrals to attract candidates. In the other hand the big companies have more options to recruit people, that's a competitive advantage because they can hire the best talents. The most used practices are the internal and external recruitment. In the internal recruitment the company look for the candidate for the job inside the organizations and fills the vacant position through promotion, this practice is really helpful because it motivates the employers. In the external 2 recruitment company look for candidates outside the organization, there are many ways to do it, the most used are utilizing websites, LinkedIn, newspaper ads and hiring a employment agencies.
Nowadays both big and small organizations can use an effective and cheap way of recruitment, the E-recruitment is the process of attracting new candidates using the internet. The use of this strategy is growing in Brazil and in North America is already used by more than 90% of the companies. Although the E-recruitment can be used different depending on the company there are four basic steps, the first is attracting candidates by using marketing strategies. The second is select the best ones and this can be done using analyzing the CVs or making games and online tests. The third one is making the first human contact, can by phone or an online interview. The last one is set a presidential interview to continue the selection process.
The E-recruitment have a lot of advantages to the organizations such as, low cost, wide geographical coverage, larger number of applicants, faster than the traditional practices, easy to record details of the applicant (CV). These advantages are the reason because E-recruitment is growing so fast, the traditional recruitment process is expensive and takes more time. Also training and developing people are deeply related to the success of a company, that's why to make an efficient selection process is so important. There is also advantages to the candidates like they can reach a big number of companies using the internet, they can look for a job in any place around the world, they can research about the company before applying to the job and usually is convenient. But as not everything is flowers, there is disadvantages to the candidates, such as more competition and selection process more elaborated.
Taking as a basis the previous topic, the prospect for the future of recruitment will be completely online, having more speed in the recruitment process and helping speed of the companies seeking the candidate, shortages of the applicant's time to move, and network disclosure capacity.