The Latest on Online Recruitment

Posted by Paul, December-4-2009

HR Magazine has featured an article on KFC’s innovative use of online recruitment to reduce hiring administration time by 16.2 years! That is quite the time-saver, by any standards.

KFC has done rather well in recent times, along with its fast-food chain buddies such as Subway and McDonalds; where recession hit eaters have been turning to cheaper options. As result the restaurant is expanding it’s 22,000 strong workforce, bringing about its heralded new online recruitment system. So efficient it has saved them “16.2 years of time”, how this slightly bizarre figure has been worked out is unclear but it is a salient point about how the sphere of online recruitment is evolving.

Since the advent of the internet as a THE tool for job hunting, a number of changes of have taken place both for recruiters and job seekers. Job seekers have easy access to millions of jobs, regardless of location and experience, and recruiters see a massive increase of candidates in their talent pool.

There has been a dramatic increase in the number candidates for roles, which is great for getting the right person for the job but also a dramatic increase in the amount of hours spent sifting through these applications, particularly for competitive sales or media jobs.

KFC’s acclimation of their very own online only recruitment system, has allowed them to use their career site to save time with an inbuilt candidate tracking system. But how many companies really have the money or ability to drive the numbers of applicants wanted to their very own recruitment site. Even big brands like KFC might find it tough to attract a good range of candidates post-recession.

Whilst the internet can bring a huge talent pool of direct applicants to a company, you don’t get the same reach of applicants you get when you bring a range of roles with a range of candidate appeal together, only this way can you be sure you can find the right person to hire.

The future requires a complete recruitment solution, a system that can be implemented for any size of business, bringing together all aspects of recruitment, job-seeker traffic, tools to regulate agencies and the ability track and administer the process easily and efficiently, in a way that doesn’t exclude any sort of company big or small.

How do you feel about directy applying through a companies site?