The scope of this article is to conduct research into the influence of the Internet on processes of personnel recruitment, in light of the growing number of companies seeking to attract candidates for employment onto their staff and the enormous number of professionals who currently use this technology in their search for employment or professional placement. The exponential growth of the Internet in the world is a direct result of the technological facilities inherent to its usage and the fascination exerted by the richness and reach of information available on the Web (Evans & Wurster, 2000). Evans et al. (2000) refer to a basic law of the information economy: “There is a universal trade-off between richness and reach.” (p. 23) To the authors, “richness” signifies the quality of the information de- fined by the user: accuracy, bandwidth, currentness, personalization, interactivity, relevance, security, and so forth, while “reach” signifies the number of people who share and have access to this information. In the former industrial economy, it was only possible to share extremely detailed information with a mere handful of people. The old technology did not allow the same desired degree of richness and reach to be attained simultaneously. In the labor market, the concepts propounded by these authors may be used to good advantage, adding to what they refer to as “asymmetry of information.” By applying this concept to recruiting and taking the company as the interested party, one can see how Internet technology may harmonize the ability of companies in general in their search for professionals, with the impetus of qualified professionals seeking a new position or change in profession (Zambos & Salazar, 2001).
TopIntroduction
The scope of this article is to conduct research into the influence of the Internet on processes of personnel recruitment, in light of the growing number of companies seeking to attract candidates for employment onto their staff and the enormous number of professionals who currently use this technology in their search for employment or professional placement.
The exponential growth of the Internet in the world is a direct result of the technological facilities inherent to its usage and the fascination exerted by the richness and reach of information available on the Web (Evans & Wurster, 2000).
Evans et al. (2000) refer to a basic law of the information economy: “There is a universal trade-off between richness and reach.” (p. 23) To the authors, “richness” signifies the quality of the information defined by the user: accuracy, bandwidth, currentness, personalization, interactivity, relevance, security, and so forth, while “reach” signifies the number of people who share and have access to this information. In the former industrial economy, it was only possible to share extremely detailed information with a mere handful of people. The old technology did not allow the same desired degree of richness and reach to be attained simultaneously.
In the labor market, the concepts propounded by these authors may be used to good advantage, adding to what they refer to as “asymmetry of information.” By applying this concept to recruiting and taking the company as the interested party, one can see how Internet technology may harmonize the ability of companies in general in their search for professionals, with the impetus of qualified professionals seeking a new position or change in profession (Zambos & Salazar, 2001).
Moreover, Shapiro and Varian (1999) stress that, with the advent of the Internet, transaction costs have an important influence on the value to the consumer. According to Shapiro et al. (1999), prospecting for opportunities through the Internet is less costly and time consuming than the traditional method, especially when the physical displacement of the candidates and the cost of postage for mailing to a large number of companies are considered.
In line with this, the main objective of this paper is to study and present the transformations that occurred at a Brazilian company, during its transition from a traditional recruiting process to a new one, based on the intensive use of the Internet.
Therefore, this paper seeks to find answers to the following question (Q1), concerning the company under analysis:
Q1: What were the results obtained with the use of the Internet in recruiting processes in terms of cost, speed, and accurate matching candidates to job positions, compared to the results using traditional methods?
TopBackground
Traditional Recruiting
Due to modernization and globalization, employment now bears a new and different profile. Recruitment sectors need to attract a group of qualified candidates to the organization. The success of recruitment is measured by the suitability and adjustment of the new employee to the job position in terms of satisfactory performance (Chiavenato, 1999).
Individual performance can be expressed by the following equation:
Performance = f (a, e, s); where “a” represents individual attributes, “e” represents on the job effort, and “s” represents organizational support (Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn, 1982).
This equation suggests that performance is the result of individual attributes, the effort that the professionals put into practice and the backing they receive from the organization.
The individual attributes should correspond to the job requirements to make performance of the work easier. One of the leading managerial abilities is selecting people capable of meeting the demands of the position.
It is worth mentioning the main recruiting techniques that make it possible to attract a reasonable number of candidates for any selection process. According to Chiavenato (1999), these techniques are: