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 ERecruitment. 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 ERecruitment. 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 Erecruitment 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 firms public Internet site or its corporate intranet. The terms of online recruitment, Internet recruitment and Erecruitment 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
encountered.

System usability

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

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 Erecruitment 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 users personal data in an opportunistic behavior as an outcome of using electronic recruitment services. The expected risk when dealing with Erecruitment 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).