What Is Digital Recruiting? (Definition And Benefits)

Updated 5 August 2023

Recruitment involves hiring candidates with a particular skill set or experience to fill specific job openings. Digital or online recruiting is a talent acquisition process involving technology or social media platforms to attract the maximum number of talented candidates. If you are planning a career in human resources, understanding how digital recruitment works can help you make a robust and effective digital recruitment strategy for a company. In this article, we answer the question, 'What is digital recruiting?', explore its benefits and discuss how to develop a digital recruiting strategy.

What Is Digital Recruiting?

The answer to 'What is digital recruiting?' is that it is a recruitment strategy that focuses on using technology to find and hire qualified candidates for an open position. A comprehensive digital recruiting strategy typically includes vacancy planning, employee onboarding, digital branding, skills testing and using virtual events or online job boards. Leveraging digital technology for digital recruitment strategy makes it easier to cover all these areas. Recruiters can connect directly with high-quality talent without moving from their location.

Benefits Of Digital Recruiting

Here are some key benefits of digital recruiting:

Better exposure

The most significant advantage of digital recruitment is the increased exposure to candidates. As markets become more globalised and the movement of people, products and services speed up, digital recruitment makes international talent more accessible. Whether through job boards, social media or digital sponsorship, it is possible to reach a greater number of more qualified candidates with just a few clicks.

Increased efficiency

Digital hiring tools also allow you to quickly and easily manage candidate responses and get exposure. It reduces the requirement of reading through hundreds of resumes or conducting screening because various software tools can perform these tasks automatically, increasing the process efficiency. It also allows you more time to focus on other aspects of the digital recruitment strategy.

Increased access to talented candidates

Combining greater exposure and increased efficiency can help find talented and high-quality candidates. Access to a larger talent collection expands the company's options when hiring for a specific position. Adding talented candidates to the organisation who contribute to its long-term growth can help you accomplish a company's business goals faster. You can also benefit a client as a recruiter by delivering qualified candidates.

Lower costs

Most organisations switch to digital recruitment because it is more cost-effective than traditional methods. All the traditional recruitment steps that can help you find the ideal candidate may require more resources and investment. It includes advertising the position, searching for candidates, interviewing them and onboarding them. These factors are present in the conventional recruitment process, resulting in considerable time and ongoing expenses. Implementing digital recruitment reduces the talent acquisition costs of the organisation.

Improved candidate experience

Business can prefer digital recruitment techniques as it makes it easy and convenient for candidates to follow the procedure and attend interviews. It enhances the candidate's experience and facilitates their engagement with the company. The candidate receives appropriate feedback at each stage, accelerating the recruitment procedure. In digital recruitment, candidates can find suitable jobs easily and attend interviews from anywhere, improving the candidates' experience.

How To Develop A Digital Recruiting Strategy

Here are the steps you can follow to develop a robust digital recruiting strategy:

Analyse the organisation's recruitment data. Consider analysing the company's digital recruitment strategies and performance. Gather information regarding the sourcing platforms and other tools and technologies the organisation uses.
Perform competitor analysis. Compare the organisation's recruitment strategies to competitors to determine how they manage the entire digital recruiting process.
Connect with the recruitment team. Ask your in-house recruiting or agency team about how they create the job description, their screening process, the tools they use to evaluate candidates and ways to interact with candidates. Determine if they keep a record of the work on a centralised platform for future uses to understand the current state of the digital recruitment strategy.
Conduct candidate source research. Try to ensure that candidates see the job postings to develop a more effective digital recruitment strategy. Instead of posting a job on a less active site, check to see if the recruiting team is active on social networks, job boards and other third-party channels.
Interact with employees and colleagues. The more you interact with the employees in the team and build relationships with people in the same field, the more proficient you may become with digital recruitment strategies. You can also follow successful recruiters online, seek their advice and exchange ideas.
Reward employee referrals. Employee referrals benefit businesses because high-performing employees usually refer other high-performing employees. It is good to establish an employee referral programme as the basis of employee recognition.

Tips For Developing A Robust Digital Recruitment Strategy

Here are some useful tips to help businesses find the talented candidate faster:

Publish relevant content

Every company valuing sustained expansion can consider ways to entice new talent while retaining existing employees. Using a business website can help attract talented prospective employees. You can do this by regularly posting blogs that describe the benefits of working in the industry and short videos mentioning interview tips to help candidates pass an interview or updating employee feedback regularly regarding their experiences working with the company.

Leverage social media

In various recruitment strategies, social media platforms are among the most efficient tools. Besides searching for candidates on specialised social media platforms, you can also post job advertisements in diverse communities and chat on various social media channels with equal success. Actively searching for a job can put substantial stress on an individual, whereas pursuing new career opportunities on a preferred social media platform can help candidates enjoy the process.

Consider website optimisation

Consider investing in website optimisation to help prospective candidates find the company online. Alongside an attractive and responsive design, it is essential to optimise the website for various devices, such as smartphones and tablets. A mobile-friendly and dynamic website or a progressive web app are good options for competing with mobile apps and retaining user requests.

Review recruitment metrics

Using recruitment software that allows monitoring recruitment metrics is a great feature of every successful digital recruitment strategy. The ability to calculate the selection ratio, monitor manager and candidate job satisfaction, assess the quality of new hires and improve the effectiveness of the recruitment funnel are among the major advantages of such tools. Many talent acquisition agencies opt to integrate chatbot-based tools that enable accurate and fast resume analysis and the identification of the most qualified candidates.

Create a strong reputation

Convincing a high-level specialist to move to the company when the business is in its start-up stage requires significant effort. As the company grows, employees become increasingly enthusiastic about working for the company. You can consider developing a strong branding strategy to strengthen the company's image for prospective candidates. Positive reviews on the company website and positive feedback on social media contribute to brand awareness. All job candidates usually research the company to which they are applying. In such a situation, a positive online reputation helps attract competent and talented employees faster.

Be reachable to candidates

Many businesses overlook the significance of sharing the HR department's contact information on their websites and social media platforms. Irrespective of how attractive the company may appear to a potential job candidate visiting its website, it may not matter if they cannot connect with the business because no contact information is available. Consider adding contact information for the HR specialists following the careers section on the website. The likelihood of receiving job offers increases the more contact information you provide, such as the phone number, email address and social media accounts.

Try to make the 'About Us' section as comprehensive as possible. This website section can also convince prospective candidates to submit their resumes.

What Is Digital Recruiting? (Definition And Benefits)