CHAPTER 2

1 LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1 Introduction
According to Ray Schreyer and John McCartney EMP (2002), In the emerging global economy,
e-commerce and e-business have increasingly become a necessary component of business
strategy and a strong catalyst for economic development. Organizations around the word have
been affected by technological, economic and political changes, which have implications on the
social, cultural and business environment, consumer expectations and employee relations.
Nowadays, organizations focus on profitability through growth, leverage information for
business efficiency, management of intellectual capital and geared for continued change.
Therefore, organizations need to build new competencies to face new challenges.

The recruitment landscape has changed globally, significantly in recent years. Low levels of
unemployment and increasing skills shortages in many areas has led to increased competition to
recruit the best people. The increased competitiveness in the recruitment market has led to
organizations spending more time, effort and resources on developing their recruitment brand
and expanding the range of advertising methods (both online and traditional) used, to try and
attract quality applicants from as broad and diverse a pool possible. The recruitment process
itself has also undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years with the utilization of the
internet. The use of the internet as a means of connecting the job seeker and the employer, and as
a medium for conducting certain elements of the recruitment process is described by a number of
different terms including online recruitment, internet recruitment, web-based recruiting and E-
Recruitment. This project involves the understanding of E-Recruitment concepts, electronic trust
and building the trust in the E-Recruitment process.

This literature review is divided into several parts sections that focus on reviewing and studying
various literatures that are related to the project. The first section discussed about the overview of
E-Recruitment such as E-recruitment definitions, E-recruitment models and also the advantages
and disadvantages of E-recruitment. Next part discussed about limitations and risk related to E-
Recruitment. towards E-recruitment,. Part four explained the technologies and strategies to build
trust, at the end the trust in web development process done by other researchers.
1.2 A Terminology of Electronic Recruitment
There are various definitions of electronic recruitment coined by famous scholars. Generally E-
recruitment is defined as:

According to Gerry Crispin and Mark mehler (2000) “E-recruitment is the process of personnel
recruitment using electronic resources, in particular the internet. Companies and recruitment
agents have moved much of their recruitment process online so as to improve the speed by which
job candidates can be matched with live vacancies. Using database technologies, and online job
advertising boards and search engines, employers can now fill posts in a fraction of the time
previously possible”

E-recruiting, embracing the term web-based recruiting can be described as any recruiting
processes that a business organization conducts via web-based tools, such as a firm’s public
Internet site or its corporate intranet. The terms of online recruitment, Internet recruitment and E-
recruitment are interchangeable (Kerrin M, Kettley, 2003).

1.2.1 E-recruitment Business Model

Many big and small organizations are using Internet as a source of recruitment. They advertise
job vacancies through worldwide web. Developments in Internet technology, notably in the
falling cost and increasing accessibility of broadband will result in an even greater impact on
traditional recruitment techniques. The traditional boundaries that existed between print media
owners, job boards, recruitment advertising agencies, recruitment consultancies and technology
companies are breaking down. Recruitment showed the biggest growth as the highest spending
sector in online advertising. (Margaret Aitchison, 2006).
According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, online recruitment represented 22.1% of all
online advertising in 2005 (networx, 2007).
1.2.2 Advantages of E-recruitment
The emerging of E-recruitment has revolutionized the process of recruitment, and made very
easy for human resource to scan and screen the candidates all over the world, the E-recruitment
has many pros, Margaret aitchison (2006) presents some of them.

1.2.2.1 Reduce costs and administration

E-recruitment enables employers to reduce advertising costs and dependency on recruitment
agencies. In most cases, administration can be substantially reduced. This is particularly
important when recruiting high volumes of staff or when receiving high volumes of applications.
With online testing you can test candidates remotely, eliminating the need for test centers and
further reducing costs and time-to hire. Time spent and resources required for testing the
candidates and marking the results are eliminated as this is carried out online.

1.2.2.2 Meet candidate expectations and enhance your employer brand

More and more candidates expect to apply directly online. They automatically judge employers
on their recruitment process. As a result employers are adopting E-recruitment solutions to
differentiate themselves and to manage the recruitment process professionally. Recruitment
enables you to raise your profile as an innovative, forward looking recruiter and provides visitors
to your website with a positive experience. E-recruitment can help build brand image.

1.2.2.3 Cut time-to-hire

With E-recruitment you can cut by as much as 75% and recruit right employees more quickly
into your business. You will also spend less time the tracking, screening and communicating with
applicants.

1.2.2.4 Improve candidate service

Online recruitment provides candidates with the potential to access the website 24 hours a day
and 7 days a week (24x7). There are no time restrictions, therefore someone who is unable to
apply for a job during normal working hours can do so in their own time.
1.2.3 Disadvantages of E-recruitment
Although E-Recruitment has potential to enhance traditional recruiting process but still it has
some limitation and drawbacks, due to this, E-recruitment is still not fully adopted by all the
companies, the demerits of E-Recruitment as follow

1.2.3.1 System usability

Turn-off candidates, particularly if the website is badly designed or technical difficulties are
encountered.

1.2.3.2 Legal consequences

Alike other recruitment sources this source also should be aware of the words used in the
advertisements otherwise it may lead to the charge of discrimination. For example, Disney World
was sued for screening the resumes preferring the key words used by whites.

1.2.3.3 Vast pool of applicants

This benefits the Organizations as well as it is disadvantage to them also because the huge
database cannot be scanned in depth. Either first few candidates are called for interview or the
resumes are screened based on some key words. On the other hand applicants also face global
competition.

1.2.3.4 Non-serious applicants

A lot of applicants forward their resumes just to know their market value. As personally the
candidates are not checked thus whether they are serious is not known. At the time of interview
the recruiter might realize that the candidate is not serious in leaving the current job. But by that
time some serious candidates might have been rejected.

1.3 E-recruitment limitations

The idea behind E-Recruitment is simple. Potential candidates place their CVs in a database on
the Web where employment agencies can then search through the CVs. Employment agencies
also post job ads on the site where potential candidates can then search through the positions to
see what interests them. The researchers suggest that the emergence of fundamentally new E-
recruitment enabled recruiting processes not only increases the opportunities, but also the risks
associated with the resourcing process. Hence, evaluation of those risks and benefits becomes
more important. It is claimed that current measures of impact in this area focus on efficiency
(input and output measures), as opposed to measures of effectiveness and quality of output.,
some of issue which should be consider are ,organizations should indicate which evaluation
measures they currently use, suggests that the former is true. Number of successful applications,
cost per hire and Internet/intranet site traffic analysis, were the most frequently used measures in
the sample; all input-output measures. Measures of quality were less evident (Kettley, 2003). The
limitations of E-recruitment are:

E-recruitment Limitations (Kettley, 2003).

1. Applicants who do not want to apply for vacancies online due to security fears.
2. Candidates can be turned off by applying if the website is poorly designed or if they encounter
technical difficulties.
3. Confidentiality and data protection.
4. The process can become/feel impersonal, which can in turn put some people off.

5. The relevance of short listing criteria (e.g. the validity and legality of searching by keywords),

1.4 The Expected Risk of Engaging E-recruitment System

The Risk has been defined as the element that gives the trust dilemma its basic character
(Johnson-George and Swap, 1982). If there was no risk and actions could be taken with complete
certainty no trust would be needed. Trust is interwoven with risk, because it reduces the risk of
falling victim to opportunistic behavior. However, trust is essentially needed only in uncertain
situations since trust effectively means to assume risks and become vulnerable to trusted parties
(Hosmer, 1995). Yet, many studies conclude that Internet users have serious doubts about data
1995). Yet, many studies conclude that Internet users have serious doubts about data security and
e-privacy and are hesitant to disclose personal data via the Internet (Laukka, 2008; Hoffman,
1999). The bulk of existing studies has been conducted in the area of online shopping, while
there is almost no research investigating E-recruitment, where the disclosure of even more and
more sensitive data is demanded of the user (Nickel and Schaumburg, 2004),.
According to Nickel and Schaumburg (2004), the risk in the context of electronic recruitment can
be defined as the potential of exploiting user’s personal data in an opportunistic behavior as an
outcome of using electronic recruitment services. The expected risk when dealing with E-
recruitment system can be concluded in the disclosure of the sensitive personal information to
the online party due to the quantity and the quality of the personal sensitive information that are
demand from user in the electronic recruitment system. This issue made the users hesitant and in
serious doubts to disclose his personal data and they need to build trust before they intend to
disclose their sensitive information.

1.5 Trust in Electronic Recruitment

E-Recruitment is becoming increasingly popular among employment services as well as
individual companies looking for qualified applicants to fill their open positions In order to
successfully screen candidates and match them to the jobs available, it is indispensable that
applicants enter informative profiles including a substantial amount of personal data into a job
database.

Because e-recruiters on the one hand are necessarily interested in getting as much valid
information of their customers as possible and because users on the other hand increasingly
distrust data collection on the Internet the ability to build user trust will be a decisive competitive
advantage of E-Recruitment sites in the future (Nickel & Schaumburg, 2004).