Assessing electronic recruitment implementation in state governments: issues and challenges.

Since the 1990s, one of the leading challenges in public personnel management has been implementing effective human capital strategies to enhance government performance and accountability. (1) The emphasis on organizational performance and individual productivity has made effective recruitment and hiring major concerns for HR managers in the public sector as government organizations fight to compete with private sector employers in attracting, developing, and retaining employees with scarce skills and expertise. (2) Specifically, reforming recruitment and hiring processes while operating within budgetary constraints has been an urgent agenda item for state governments.

Although many states have yet to experience a worker shortage, a 2002 Council of State Governments report pointed to several factors and labor conditions, including the looming retirements of baby boomers and budget cuts that foreshadowed a labor crisis for state governments. (3) Accordingly, there is great need for innovative approaches to recruiting and retaining new workers in state governments. Slow and complicated recruitment or hiring processes can deter applicants from applying for state jobs. (4) To try to address this issue, government agencies have begun to adopt and improve electronic recruitment systems to speed the hiring process and be more responsive to applicants

All U.S. states and most of the country's large cities and counties have recruitment Web sites. (5) The U.S. Office of Personnel Management has also established an e-recruitment Web site, http://usajobs.opm.gov, that is the federal government's official one-stop, centralized source for federal jobs and employment information. Initially launched in 1996 to streamline the federal job search, (6) it now lists more than 100,000 open positions.

E-recruitment can be defined as any recruiting process that an organization conducts via Web-based tools such as the organization's public Internet site or its intranet. (7) E-recruitment also involves candidates searching for job information and completing at least some part of the application process online, even if that is only reading a position describing or finding instructions for applying. The primary drivers for pursuing e-recruitment include improving organizational image, reducing recruitment costs, reducing administrative burden, and employing better tools for recruitment teams. (8)

Despite increased research on workforce challenges in the public sector, limited attention has been paid to the issues and challenges of implementing e-recruitment in state governments. The purposes of the study reported here were to assess the status of e-recruitment and to analyze the issues and challenges state governments faced while they implemented e-recruitment systems. The research questions we sought to answer were

* What are the e-recruitment methods being used in state governments?

* How do agencies evaluate the performance of their e-recruitment system?

* What issues and challenges did state governments face when implementing e-recruitment systems?

To get answers to these questions we conducted a phone survey of 23 state government personnel agencies, asking respondents to provided information on e-recruitment status, evaluation methods, implementation challenges, and future projects related to e-recruitment. The lessons and implications for effectively implementing e-recruitment for state government jobs that were drawn from the agencies' survey responses are presented at the conclusion of this article.

E-Recruitment Implementation: Benefits and Challenges

Scholars and practitioners agree that recruiting and selecting highly qualified candidates for government jobs is crucial to providing quality public service and improving the performance of government organizations. While civil service systems have been designed to ensure that government job candidates are recruited and hired in a fair and impartial way, those systems have been criticized for being too complicated too inflexible. (9) A number of attempts have been made to simplify the recruitment and selection of government employees, including decentralizing the hiring process, streamlining the application process, and incorporating technology into the HR function.

State governments have generally adopted more flexible and varied HR systems than the federal civil service, relying less on uniform models of employment, recruitment, classification, and compensation. (10) A national study of state employee worker shortages (11) found that, as of 2002, 37 states had begun doing targeted recruitment for certain jobs, conducting exit interviews to evaluate an agency's work environment, and offering flextime to employees. Furthermore, 30 states had reformed their employee classification and pay systems. Increased use of the Internet for improving states' recruitment and hiring processes was also a trend identified by the survey. (12)

Much of the evidence supporting the use of e-recruitment points to time and cost savings. The speed with which several steps of the recruitment process can be carried out online reportedly leads to a shorter recruitment cycle. (13) Applications can be processed and delivered within minutes rather than weeks, saving both organizations and job seekers valuable time. Additionally, organizations can save considerable amounts of money when recruiting online. (14)

A survey of 50 organizations in the United Kingdom that used e-recruitment found that the organizations had decided to pursue e-recruitment in order to improve their corporate image and profile, reduce recruitment costs, reduce administrative burdens, and employ better tools for the recruitment team. (15) The survey showed that 55 percent of respondents expected their organization to reduce its use of other recruitment methods in the future.

Similarly, research on U.S. federal government recruitment methods found that e-recruitment can serve several recruitment purposes, including improving an organization's image through branding, educating applicants about the organization and its career opportunities, and making it easier for applicants to updates their resumes and contact information. (16) Other benefits include the fact that there are no strict space constraints for position announcements posting online, which allows to publish comprehensive advertisements with links to job descriptions, applicant specifications, and job previews. (17) Furthermore, information about open positions and applicants can be updated quickly and efficiently. (18)

Advertising open positions on the Internet also facilitates the recruitment of local, national, and international job candidates. (19) Furthermore, the integration of an e-recruitment systems and agencies' human resource information systems (HRIS) can enable recruiters to access several databases in the core HRIS, extract data on previous hires and the workforce, and import data on the new ones. Such integration is also useful for recruiters and line managers who need to think strategically when doing workforce planning, assessments, and diversity management.

According Kerrin & Kettley, (20) e-recruitment has also led to improved internal customer relationship management. For example, e-recruitment can facilitate the decentralization of many HR operations, with responsibilities for many aspects of the recruitment process being given to staff at the business unit, departmental, or line management level. E-recruitment enables a direct link between the candidate and the recruiter or hiring manager. The trends in e-recruitment use suggest that, in the future, the candidate will be connected to the central system and the line manager will be involved in the online application process. Accordingly, the role of HR in recruitment will become more facilitative than administrative. (21)

Major issues and challenges with e-recruitment have centered on the quantity and quality of candidates using Web-based tools, the lack of knowledge of e-recruitment within the HR community, and limited commitment to e-recruitment by senior managers. (22) For example, many applications from unqualified candidates have been received by organizations using e-recruitment systems. At the same time, the lack of knowledge of e-recruitment among HR professionals and the limited commitment of senior managers has hindered the effective implementation of e-recruitment in some organizations.

Furthermore, recruiting through the Internet has raised concerns among potential applicants about keeping their personal information secure and confidential. (23) Many organizations' recruitment sites display privacy statements that detail how the information applicants provide will be stored and used. However, data security remains a major concern, particularly when it comes to online testing and making hiring decisions.

Lin and Stasinskaya (24) have noted that the accuracy, verifiability, and accountability of applicants' data are also major issues for managers whose organizations use e-recruitment systems. Some managers have also been concerned that e-recruiting may limit diversity among applicants. In addition, Lin and Stasinskaya (25) also wrote that the lack of personal interactions during the process of applying for employment online limits the flow of communication between potential employees and the employer, leading to frustration on the part of the job candidates and missed opportunities to share or gather additional information by employers. To improve such communication, some e-recruitment systems incorporate e-mail follow-ups by recruitment personnel or managers with applicants.

As Kerrin and Kettley (26) noted, online testing raises issues related to applicants' reactions to the testing, the equivalence of online and pencil-and-paper tests, adverse impact, and protecting candidates' identities. Therefore, before adopting any kind of online selection method, organizations should carefully study the impact of these methods and the strengths and weaknesses of the methods.

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