Approximately two-thirds (68,97%) of top South African companies believe the internet is an effective recruitment channel and almost half (46,81%) are using online recruitment as part of their overall recruitment strategy, a CareerJunction survey has revealed.
This is an increase of 22,81% since 2003, the results of the Online Recruitment Corporate Survey 2005 show.
In comparison, international research conducted by IRS Employment Review has shown that two-thirds (65%) of FTSE 100 companies use the internet to recruit candidates.
The survey was conducted by CareerJunction during October this year with human-resources directors and managers from 60 of the top-200 companies, as defined by the Financial Mail.
The aim of the survey was to establish the attitudes towards and uptake of the internet as a recruitment channel among South Africa’s top companies.
Of those companies that do advertise their vacancies online, 25,19% also advertise in print, 37,04% via recruitment agencies, 18,52% through word of mouth and 19,26% through other means, the survey showed.
“This illustrates that although online recruitment is on the increase, companies are still using traditional methods in conjunction with the internet as part of their overall recruitment strategy,” said Kris Jarzebowski, MD of CareerJunction.
According to the survey results, 71,43% of the companies who advertise their vacancies online do this via a careers page on their website. Just more than half of these companies simply use their careers page to advertise their job vacancies, while 14,81% link straight through to an e-mail address, and 29,63% have a formal online application process in place.
In terms of managing the responses that are received on the internet, 69,23% have a screening and filtering application in place, while 84,21% store résumés in a talent-pool database.
An interesting result that came out of the survey is that all the companies that use online recruitment to advertise and fill vacancies still maintain a list of preferred recruitment providers.
Four out of five companies (81,25%) that have a careers page on their website rely on the power of their brand to attract talent, while 6,25% advertise their job pages in print and 12,50% make use of job boards.
“The findings from the Online Recruitment Corporate Survey clearly show that South Africa is following in the footsteps of international trends when it comes to embracing online recruitment,” concluded Jarzebowski. — I-Net Bridge