Keywords

E-Recruitment, Issues, Challenges, Linked In, Recruiters, Job Seekers.

Introduction

Humans are by nature social, and over the years, humans have tried to communicate in various languages and ways. And with the development of the world, communication between humans has become one click away, and everyone around the work has begun to benefit from the available communication methods. Many applications have appeared that serve various types of fields in life, and the business world is a part of human life, so it is become necessary to create new means to communicate in professional level, to facilitate the life of workers, help them discover new opportunities, and form multi-interest relationships.

Human Resource Management

Human resource management is the procedure of employing people, coaching them, paying them, creating policies, and develop strategies that help make the organization-employee relationship a mutually beneficial relationship. Human resource has experienced many changes over the last two decades, taking more important role in today’s businesses. In the past, human resource was more of an administrative role rather than a strategic role important to the success of the businesses.

Today every management understand that you need people to perform tasks and get work accomplished in businesses. Even with the most advanced machines, humans are still required. That’s why one of the major tasks in human resource is recruitment.

Recruitment involves the whole hiring process from announcing a job to negotiating payment packages. Within the recruitment function, there are four main stages:

- Development recruitment plan. This plan allows human resource to see how many people they need to hire based on returns expectations.

- Set policies to encourage multi culture working environments. Multiculturalism becomes more important.

- Recruitment or staffing. This includes searching for the right people to fill the vacancy.

- Choice. In this stage, candidate will be interviewed and chosen. This stage is followed by guidance, developing, and motivation.

Traditional Recruitment

Traditionally, recruitment is posting ads on a job board or in newspapers. Then when applications come, hiring representative pick out the ones that fit to the job based on their resume. Then a face-to-face interview would be organised, and the most fitting candidate would be offered the job. Organisations sticking to this traditional approach are losing a lot of real opportunity to get the right talents. Not all good talent could be found through job boards or will applying for roles.

E-Recruitment

Today’s world is technology based world and we can feel its presence in each sphere of our lives. Conception of internet has changed our lives tremendously and it has also changed the perception of people towards their work (Barber, 2006). The entire world currently is just a click away and we are able to connect with people from all over the world. Everything has been affected by technology and recruitment is not far from that, today every person looking for a job starts from search engines on the Internet; the old way of advertising for jobs has become marginalized(Girard & Fallery, 2009).

Many websites and applications have appeared, linking job seekers with business owners and human resources. Perhaps the most successful worldwide platform is LinkedIn, which we will analyse it in detail in this search and we will discuss the reasons behind its success (Okolie & Irabor, 2017; Patton et al., 2003).

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an online business and recruitment service that operates across websites and mobile apps. Launched on 2003, the platform is mainly used for professional networking and career development, allows job seekers to post their resumes and employers to post jobs. As of February 2022, LinkedIn has more than 830 million registered members from more than 200 countries and territories (Guillory & Hancock, 2012).

LinkedIn allows members -both employees and organizations- to make profiles and link with each other in a virtual social network which represents real-life professional relations. Members can request anyone to join and follow their pages and add them to their connection. LinkedIn can also be used to organize events, create groups, write articles, and publish job postings, media posts, and so on.

The Evolution of Recruitment Methods

Over the latest decade, a new recruitment practice emerged, the creation of CVs to show the candidates’ profiles and skills. Recruitment became more focused on efficiently to choose and join qualified candidates with the right positions. There were a number of restrictions, involving the fact that recruiters had to work over newspaper ads. Utilizing and hiring were very difficult at this stage because candidates had to submit their typewritten CVs by hand or mail and recruiters had to track and classify -manually- a huge number of resumes.

The entry of computers into business significantly changed the recruitment process by launching software and tracking systems and candidates' databases. This allows collecting and searching through application documents easier and faster (Hood et al., 2014; Hutchins, 2016).

Then when the internet came, it has made a radical change and transformed the recruiting process. While recruitment before was domestic, the internet allowed recruiter to look for applicants on a global scale. Various sites and social media platforms offered recruiters a wide reach, helping them to find the best applicants from around the world (Johnson, 2017; Li et al., 2014; McCabe, 2017).

The evolving technologies make recruiters rely on the latest technology to recruit the best applicant for any job. Using their big databases, recruiters can contact candidate in limited time and with greater skill more than ever.

Job Applicants as a Challenge to the Recruiter

With the huge number of resumes, and in light of the challenges in the global economy, people are constantly searching for jobs available via, then applying for all the available jobs, regardless of their qualifications. Which put departments and recruitment companies in a challenge to find the right resume that matching the job, because when a job is offered, thousands of resumes are sent (Karasek & Bryant, 2012).

Perhaps the most prominent solutions of the era for employment and professional networking is the LinkedIn platform, which has become a search engine for many candidates and job seekers, and a practical way to communicate between organizations and people. In the presence of LinkedIn, the recruiter now can match the profile with the CV and filter the data to choose the most suitable candidate for the job (Leask, 1996).

Linkedin.com Case Study

Linked in was founded in December 2002 by Reid Hoffman and the founding team members from PayPal and Socialnet.com.

The basic function of Linked In is to let users create profiles, which typically consist of a resume explaining their work experience, education and training, talents, skills, main projects and a personal portrait. Companies and recruiters can add jobs and hunt applicants. Users can discover jobs, networking and business opportunities recommended by someone in their contact list, they also can search for jobs that they prefer to apply for. In another hand companies can create a page to be followed by their employees, and other users also have the ability to follow different companies (Oad, 2012).

Linked in allows users to get "connections" with each other in an online professional network which may represent real life social relationships, via linked In they can invite anybody to become a connection. Members can find introductions to the connections of connections -called second degree connections- and connections of second level connections – called third degree connections (Sumbaly et al., 2013; Zide et al., 2014).

User's list of networks can be utilized in many ways. As an example, they can search for second-degree connections working on organization they are interested in, and then they will be able to ask a specific first degree connection in common to introduce them.

Users can interact with each other in a variety of ways:

- Engaging and interact with other members by like posts and congratulate them to a new position or complete a course, personal occasion, as well as contact each other by direct messaging.

- Users have the ability to share with their network’s different media with text and filters.

- They can write posts and articles, join groups and interact with a specific professional community.

LinkedIn is remarkably designed for personal branding, it developed from being a simple platform for job hunters into a professional network which give the members a chance to make a personal brand -public face persona- displayed on social media platforms like Linked In, Twitter and other networks that show expertise and boost new connections.

Challenges Recruiters Face When Searching for the Perfect Candidate

It’s up to recruiters to reach out to the suitable candidates, build talent pools and network. These techniques not only a way to find the best candidates but also an enormous opportunity to improve company and personal branding.

Searching for the right talent needs a type of training and practice. Recruitment websites differ in different ways, and it depends on the recruiter to get the best of these websites and hunt the best employee fitting to the position. They need to determine their targets and know exactly what they should look for. The recruiters must be aware of the exposure of the category they are looking for, and where they will find the candidates among the huge amount of large and small recruitment sites, and they should have a far-sightedness from the cultural level of the users on certain employment sites.

The professional experience of the recruiters is high importance, they may find what they are looking for, but if they have a certain skill, and they could get better results.

Another problem that is not usually discussed is the ability of recruiters to classify candidates and read the huge number of resumes. In the coming survey in this research, it turns out that there are many job seekers who randomly apply to jobs even if they know they are not suitable, which puts recruiters in a great challenge to choose the most suitable candidates.

Theoretical Framework

Variables and Theories

The research model has been proposed for the study in which the digital platform -LinkedIn- is independent variable whereas recruiting problem is dependent variable Figure 1.

In this research we examined the connections between professional networking platforms and recruiting best practice. Participants (N=50) responded to questions about the online presence and using the network for recruiting purposes.

Tong (2009) has led a study to examine employed applicant experiences and behaviours with third party and the recruitment technology adoption. In the study, he found that Using e-recruitment technology is deemed important for employed applicant as it indicates that detailed job information would lead to better decision-making. Moreover, in the Signaling Model Spence (1973) describes the hiring process as an investment and likens it to playing the Lottery. And it gets better explained by observable personal attributes described as Signals.

Hypotheses

Based on the above discussing, we developed three hypotheses, conducted surveys, and conducted several interviews with various people to reach the conclusion.

H1: Recruitment issues are influenced by digital platforms.

H2: The digital platforms formulating an opportunity for both recruiter and job seeker

Data Collection

The questionnaire was sent to more than 50 participants, and 44 participants filled out Table 1.

Table 1 Research Survey Questions
Questionnaire	Yes	No	Sometimes
Do you have a profile on a job site or professional networking platform?
Do you apply and search for jobs using these platforms?
Do you read the job description in detail and match it with your qualifications before applying?
Have you ever applied for jobs randomly and later found out that you are completely unqualified, and the job specifications do not apply to you?
Have you previously succeeded in applying for a job online and got it?
Have recruitment companies or recruiters contacted you previously in order to nominate you for a job?
In your opinion, the chance of getting a job that was advertised online decreases every time the advertisement is published.
Tell us about an employment experience you had that is worth sharing

Data Analysis

Results

Many people use professional platforms for recruitment purposes, and many of them are actually interested in reading the job description, its details and check if they are suitable for the position. Although there are a high percentage of people who apply for randomly jobs and this last one is make challenge for recruits. The huge number of random applicants for jobs is one of the issues and problems of e-recruitment, and this supports the hypothesis “Recruitment issues is influenced by digital platforms” Figure 2.

By reading many comments in the survey and through our personal meetings with a number of employees, we found that recruitment platforms and professional networks represent opportunities for many people and are a reliable tool for them to search for new opportunities, career development and growth, as we assumed in the second hypothesis “The digital platforms formulating an opportunity for both recruiter and job seeker”.

Conclusion

The internet today represents an open and unlimited opportunities, and recruitment platforms offer solutions that did not exist for many times. The tremendous development in employment has given recruits and employees wonderful abilities to communicate with each other and make them overcome many challenges of recruitment and communications. Today, we find many people on the LinkedIn platform are there just for networking and build relationships, not only for recruiting goals.

Linked In has turned from a recruitment platform to a professional communication platform, that gives every user the opportunity to draw a picture that he wants to show about himself or as it’s called “personal branding”.

This study tested the importance of job sites for job seekers and recruiters on another level, and it finds out that there is a positive impact of digital recruitment platforms in overcoming previous recruitment challenges and issues.

Recommendations

We believe that adding some algorithms to recruitment platforms may help recruiters filter the most suitable employees for the job, especially in the circumstance of the huge number of applicants, which will reduce the effort and force recruiters to find the right person in the right place.

Job seekers should also help recruiters to find them, by adding all the details that the recruits want to read and pay attention to the design of the page, the profile picture and the content of their profiles because it is the gateway of the communication.

Recruitment and professional networking sites such as LinkedIn are one of the solutions to recruiting issues and problems that have persisted for years and the correct and proper use of them can yield great results. It is important to be present on professional networking platforms, even if you are not looking for a job; after all it is personal branding.

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Received: 07-Jan-2023, Manuscript No. ASMJ-23-13101; Editor assigned: 10-Jan-2023, PreQC No. ASMJ-23-13101(PQ); Reviewed: 17-Jan-2023, QC No. ASMJ-23-13101; Revised: 24-Feb-2023, Manuscript No. ASMJ-23-13101(R); Published: 03-Mar-2023