The recruiting process has changed immeasurably in the last decade. Technology, once a niche skill set, has become the bread and butter of most semi-skilled and skilled work, and recruitment is no different.

If you are venturing into recruitment for the first time or evolving your recruitment process to be more streamlined and effective, online job sites can offer many benefits. Not least is the speed at which you can identify, assess, and either disqualify or hire potential candidates.

What are the Traditional Recruitment Methods?

Traditional recruitment methods are considered tried and true for a reason: they work. However, in this modern age, they don’t always work as well, or as quickly, as employers may like.

As well as being slower than job sites, traditional recruiting methods can limit the applicant pool. In areas where there is a sparse population density, this can be a problem (especially for specialist roles). Traditional forms of job advertisement and recruiting include, but are not limited to:

• Newspaper advertisement
• Internal hiring
• Listing with the local employment office
• Hiring through a temp agency
• Network based recruitment

These methods of recruitment have their benefits. For example, network-based recruitment can be useful in highly specialized fields, such as academia, where many professionals are involved in training upcoming individuals. Likewise, hiring through a temp agency can provide very quick cover within a role, but at the risk of getting someone who is not the perfect fit for the company long-term.

How Long Does Traditional Recruiting Take?

Depending on the method that you choose, traditional recruitment methods can take anywhere from one to three months (and sometimes longer, depending on the work climate and nature of the role). This is because such methods follow this structure:

1. Identify vacant role
2. Identify ideal candidate
3. Advertise for applicants either via an advert, internal bulletin, temp agency or colleague
4. Wait for applications
5. Assess and interview or decline applicants
6. Train new employees

Add to this the likelihood that a new employee will need to give notice to their current job, and you could be waiting months before they ever set foot in your establishment. Using modern, online recruitment techniques can help you to mitigate or side-step some of these downsides.

How Do Job Sites Accelerate Recruitment?

One of the main ways in which online job sites accelerate recruitment is by making a job posting accessible to thousands of applicants immediately. This is one reason why they are the number one place to post jobs right now. As well as allowing you to connect with candidates almost immediately, job sites speed up recruitment in the following ways:

Increasing the Talent Pool

When you place your job posting on a site, you will immediately gain access to a wider talent pool, which will speed the recruitment process by allowing you to reach qualified candidates that meet all your requirements. When you advertise locally or traditionally, you are pulling from a smaller candidate pool unless you reach out via professional networks. Therefore, the best candidate still may not match all of your criteria. Job sites make it easier to fit the best possible fit.

Effective Resume Filtration

When you use job sites to advertise open positions, you also gain the ability to proactively search through any resumes that site has uploaded to its database. Unlike traditional recruitment, where you must manually read each resume presented to you, job sites allow you to effectively filter resumes using keywords (for example, certain skills and qualifications).

This drastically reduces the time you spend filtering unsuitable applications and increases your chance of finding a good candidate quickly.

Quick and Direct Communication

Job sites often have built-in communication systems, and when they don’t, you will generally have the option of reaching out to candidates directly via email or phone. This increases the speed at which you can make preliminary assessments of potential candidates.

During traditional recruitment processes, scheduling of interviews and the gathering of supplementary information are often slowed by inconsistent communication. While no job site can guarantee a potential candidate will communicate effectively, they do ensure that quick communication is accessible.

So, as you can see, job sites offer a range of benefits that can make the process of finding and hiring new employees easier for businesses of all sizes. From widening the candidate pool to filtering unsuitable applicants, a good job site will take a lot of the legwork out of the recruitment process.