How?

The recruitment process can be divided into five stages.  

The first stage includes the determination of the recruitment objectives, and consequently prepares a basis for the development of the recruitment strategy. In addition, pre-hire, post-hire, and post-hiring outcomes are classified. More detailed recruitment objectives are necessary to secure a certain standard for the next stages of the recruitment process.  

After the identification of the main recruitment objectives, the development strategy can be derived. Therefore, the following questions should be answered: - Who should be recruited? - Where to recruit? - When to recruit? - What recruitment sources should be used? - What message should be communicated? - Who should carry out the recruitment process? In addition to the stated questions, budget limitations should be taken into consideration at this stage as well.  

Once the recruitment strategy is developed, a company can launch specific recruitment activities. They may include recruiters, recruitment sources, and message to be communicated (intervening variables). The right combination of recruitment activities leads to the desired pre-hire and post-hire outcomes, and thus to successful recruitment results.  

Recent reports have noted that small business now recruit more graduates (70%) than larger companies (64%), and small business have the biggest rise in graduate recruitment.  

The trend of using online recruitment is common for SMEs as well as for big corporations, and helps to create a large pool of qualified applicants quite fast. A recent research conducted by LinkedIn for SMEs on how candidates want to be recruited, shows that 65% of candidates used social professional networks or online job boards to find an open position. Nowadays, it is quite hard to find any organization without a web site or a professional profile on the LinkedIn platform. 

It has also been shown that the usability of a company website affects an applicant's perception of a job, with a focus on hyperlinks and test rather than graphic images and navigation links. The number of companies using mobile phone technology has increased by 70% since 2011, and there has been a 90% increase in the number of applicants who have learnt of job opportunities via mobile phone technology. 

There are a lot of advantages to the internet recruitment. One of the most important ones is that it is cost-effective, it is easy and quick to post an advertisement or remove it, a great number of responses arrive very fast and a wider pool of applicants is presented. Especially at a time when there are more applicants than vacancies, the online recruitment can also save time of a HR manager, rejecting the unsuitable candidates automatically with the use of tools for filtering applicants and tools for starting the selection process. Many job applicants are also using the Internet and social media to find a suitable position. 

There are, however, issues with e-recruitment, including the one-way communication system, the fact that it is impersonal and passive, and the fact that it creates an artificial distance between the individual and the organization.