Internet has had a "dramatic" effect on recruitment process

31 March 2010 04:42:30

The Association of Professional Recruitment Consultants (APRC) has said that recruitment agencies have become dependent on using the internet to find candidates.

Chief executive Peter Clayton stated that while ten years ago people were "horrified" at the idea of offering recruitment via the internet, nowadays "it's not one of those things that could happen; it does happen a lot".

A recent survey from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development showed that in 2006, 71 per cent of respondents said that they used e-recruitment to reduce costs, 60 per cent did so to broaden the selection pool and 47 per cent to increase the speed of hiring.

Mr Clayton spoke on the advantages of the process: "Now a good candidate can get an interview [more quickly]. You can put your CV on at ten o'clock that night before you go to bed and have an interview by lunchtime the following day."

However, Mr Clayton also added that the selection process needed to be a lot stricter, as the internet had made it so that there tended to be more applicants for a position: "Where you might have 50 CVs to go through ten years ago, you might have four times that amount or five times that amount [now]."