The Uptake of Online Recruitment Among South Africas Top Companies

The results of the Online Recruitment Corporate Survey 2005 were revealed at a presentation held in Johannesburg last week. The survey was conducted by CareerJunction -South Africaís leading online placement service - during October 2005 with HR Directors and HR Managers from 60 of the Top 200 Companies, as defined by the Financial Mail in 2005. The aim of the survey was to establish the attitudes towards and uptake of the internet as a recruitment channel among South Africaís top companies.

The event was hosted by CareerJunction and co-sponsored by Adcorp Talent Resourcing and JobVest who specialise in recruitment advertising. The presentation was attended by more than 50 HR Managers and HR Directors from top South African brands.

The results revealed that approximately two-thirds (68.97%) of top South African companies believe that the internet is an effective recruitment channel and almost half (46.81%) are using online recruitment as part of their overall recruitment strategy, which is an increase of 22.81% since 2003. In comparison, international research conducted by IRS Employment Review has shown that two-thirds (65%) of FTSE 100 companies use the internet to recruit candidates.

Of those companies that do advertise their vacancies online, 25.19% also advertise in print, 37.04% via recruitment agencies, 18.52% through word of mouth and 19.26% through other means. ìThis 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,î says Kris Jarzebowski, MD of CareerJunction.

According to the survey results, 71.43% of the companies who advertise their vacancies online do this via a careers page on their website. Just over half of these companies simply use their careers page to advertise their job vacancies, while 14.81% link straight through to an e-mail address, and 29.63% have a formal online application process in place.

Regarding technology, two-thirds of the companies that have implemented technology decided to develop it themselves, while 5.56% purchased it and 27.78% opted to rent it. ìThe 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,î says Jarzebowski.

The findings also revealed that six out of seven companies who use online recruitment (85.71%) advertise both graduate and experienced vacancies online.

In terms of managing the responses that are received on the internet, 69.23% have a screening and filtering application in place while 84.21% store resumes in a talent pool database. ìThese findings depict the trend that companies are increasingly finding a need to handle the influx of responses that they are receiving via the internet. CareerJunctionís online competency based screening tool - Profiler ñ allows companies to filter out unsuitable candidates, screen them and then interview them online. This streamlines the recruitment process while at the same time is fair, consistent and legally compliant,î says Jarzebowski.

The survey asked companies embracing online recruitment what is the single greatest benefit that they have seen, using the internet as part of their strategy, 20,37% responded that it was a higher quality of applicants, 31.48% said it was cost savings that they have seen, 25.93% said that it was time savings where they saw the most benefit, while 22.22% responded that it was an improvement in process efficiencies.

An interesting result that came out of the survey is that all the companies that use online recruitment to advertise and fill vacancies, still maintain a list of preferred recruitment providers. ìThis also illustrates a trend to not cut Agencies out of the whole recruitment process,î says Hilton Brown, CEO of Adcorp Talent Resourcing.

Four out of five companies (81.25%) that have a careers page on their website rely on the power of their brand to attract talent, while 6.25% advertise their job pages in print, and 12.50% make use of job boards.

ìThe 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,î concludes Jarzebowski.