The aim of the survey was to establish attitudes towards and uptake of the internet as a recruitment channel.
Presentation of the results was hosted by CareerJunction, co-sponsored by Adcorp Talent Resourcing and JobVest, who specialise in recruitment advertising, and attended by more than 50 HR managers and directors from top South African brands.
The results show an increase of 22.81% since 2003 in online recruitment. By comparison, international research conducted by IRS Employment Review indicated that two-thirds (65%) of FTSE 100 companies used the internet to recruit candidates.
Of those companies posting their vacancies online, 25.19% also advertised in print, 37.04% via recruitment agencies, 18.52% by word of mouth and 19.26% by other means. "This illustrates that although online recruitment is on the increase, companies are still using traditional methods in conjunction with the internet as part of their overall recruitment strategy," commented MD of CareerJunction Kris Jarzebowski.
According to the survey results, 71.43% of companies who advertised their vacancies online did so via a careers page on their website. Just over half simply used their careers page to advertise vacancies, while 14.81% linked straight through to an e-mail address, and 29.63% had a formal online application process in place.
Two-thirds of the companies implementing technology decided to develop it themselves, while 5.56% purchased it and 27.78% opted to rent. "The trend, internationally, is that more companies are choosing to rent an online recruitment application service, as this reduces the costs of constant maintenance and upgrades that are necessary to keep up to date with technology," said Jarzebowski.
Six out of seven companies using online recruitment (85.71%) advertised both graduate and experienced vacancies online. In terms of managing responses, 69.23% had a screening and filtering application in place while 84.21% stored resumes in a talent pool database.
Companies using online recruitment mentioned as benefits a higher quality of applicants (20.37%), cost savings (31.48%), time savings (25.93%) and an improvement in process efficiencies (22.22%).
All the companies using online recruitment still maintained a list of preferred recruitment providers. "This also illustrates a trend to not cut agencies out of the whole recruitment process," commented Hilton Brown, CEO of Adcorp Talent Resourcing.
Four out of five companies (81.25%) with a careers page on their website relied on the power of their brand to attract talent, while 6.25% advertised their job pages in print, and 12.50% made use of job boards.
"The findings from the Online Recruitment Corporate Survey clearly show that South Africa is following in the footsteps of international trends when it comes to embracing Online Recruitment," concluded Jarzebowski.
