About a decade ago, recruiters would use the yellow pages and personally call up everyone to find job seekers and maintain records or phone numbers based on job roles. Career fairs, newspapers and referrals were also prominent ways of landing a job. Over the years, following the same trends as seen in developed countries like USA and Australia, Indian’s too started moving online for their job search. This is evident in the fact that the expenditure on offline classified ads has decreased as much as 75 percent over the last few decades. The world is now moving into social media and recruiters too are increasingly using social media platforms to source candidates.

A social media platform is the new way in the field of job search and recruitment. It provides a greater way for candidates to connect and network easily. For a candidate, a successful job search is based on a candidate meeting a company that matches all that they have to offer, while for a company, it is essential that the candidate meets all the requirements of job position. With the popularity of social media, and almost every candidate and organization having its social media presence, it is important for potential candidates to utilize the power of social networking to the fullest.

Technology has helped the industry as a whole in a lot of different ways over the past few years.

Impact can be seen on every step of the recruitment process. Some of the contributions are:

• Social Recruitment: Technology has made it much easier for recruiters to find relevant candidates through social media
• Recruitment Marketplace: Connecting employers, job seekers and agencies
• Artificial Intelligence: Algorithms help match job seekers to job openings
• Video Interviews: Made it much more easier to source candidates from any where in the world

With the technology being ubiquitous, job seekers are focusing on more electronic resources such as corporate websites, online job search engines and job aggregators, Internet classifieds, to facilitate the job search process. It is beyond doubt that with the online migration of recruitment functions and job search resources, it has largely extended the accessibility, ease, and efficiency of the recruitment process. In this process, the HRs have been forced to define set of best practices for online recruitment. Hiring can be considered substandard, when the new hire failure rate is high. If the new hires are terminated or if they quit within first few months, regardless of their performance, then the new hiring can hardly be called a success. Such things can be taken into considerations while evaluating an HR function.

With technology paving its way in all sectors, the recruitment industry is sure to get touched with job roles moving towards Machine Learning, Automation and Artificial Intelligence

Some of the challenges which are usually faced by online recruitment portals include:

• Response Rate: Most of the job portals are not able to get a reply to candidate application for the job seeker
• Database Updation: Candidates do not update their profiles or contact details
• Slow hiring process: With multiple stakeholders involved in the entire process, closing each job opening can some times take weeks to complete

However, with each passing year the job roles are changing. The number of jobs might see a slump in coming days and would eventually pick up again. With technology paving its way in all sectors, the recruitment industry is sure to get touched with job roles moving towards Machine Learning, Automation and Artificial Intelligence. In close to ten years the online recruitment portals will move to more sophisticated Application Tracking Systems (ATS) to manage the large volume of job applications better. The focus will shift from access to data to experience of the process. Each of the job portals would want to get the entire recruitment process online. Hence, the recruitment portals will develop smarter algorithms to parse CVs and find relevant candidates.

It is essential that the HRs are updated about the changes. It is better to use strategies which will help you project a positive yet convincing image of your self. Some of the key factors to be considered include Going Social - Job seekers are active on social media platforms and the recruiters will have to be available there to source the best candidates; Going Diverse: More platforms should be used to post the job on as that will lead to a better hit rate and Using an ATS to keep track of the process.

Today, internet has simplified everything, making all the information available at just one click of a button, notifying the candidate about the millions of job opportunities from all across the world on one single platform.