Successful businesses are able to attract qualified applicants, which is not an easy thing to do when considering the competitive nature among employers and the rareness of qualified applicants. Potential applicants look at multiple opportunities at the same time, and they make their selection based on the information they know about the job and the business. Thus, a business should create its recruitment campaign accordingly in order to attract and influence qualified applicants, in a cost effective manner. An online recruitment page will cost less than traditional recruitment mediums like newspapers, job banks and head hunters, and can offer a wider and more immediate scope of communication. As a result businesses that recruit online have to focus on what are the appropriate attributes a website should have in order to influence the applicant’s decision.
A recruitment site, just like any other site will have two basic attributes, vividness and content. Vividness includes the use of images or sounds to enhance the users’ sensory experiences able to make a website more appealing, intense and memorable, likely to capture and keep attention. On the other hand, the content of a website, information written about the job and the business, may reduce uncertainty about the job if proven useful, current, relevant and timely to its core audience. That is because applicants might use information on the site as a signal for the quality of the employer. Information can be given on company culture, training, benefits etc. As a result, businesses that recruit online have the ability to decrease uncertainty and increase attraction. But for the best outcome to be achieved, a business must look at its reputation and focus on the right capabilities accordingly.
The decision of what attributes to use when recruiting online can be determined by the business’s reputation. Employers with good reputations will gain attention regardless of the attributes of their recruitment sites, while the opposite will occur for employers with poor reputation. As a result, it is important for employers with poor reputation to create the positive emotional connection that did not exist before. Research showed that focusing on vividness has no significant effect on attractiveness, while focusing on content, by providing large amounts of information, can increase motivation and effectiveness because it will counter any pre-existing beliefs about the business, created by uncertainty or negative opinions, or create the appropriate ones if none existed in the first place. On the other hand, employers with good reputation focusing on either attribute, or both attributes, would provide the same effect on attractiveness, having the attributes act as substitutes. In this case, employers with good reputations should note that vividness will have positive effects when the amount of information is low, but may become insignificant when the amount of information is high. Even though employers with good reputations will gain attention regardless of the attributes, they should still recruit online, focusing on creating the appropriate recruitment site in order to reaffirm previously held positive beliefs, or it may make them susceptible to recruitment competition from firms with poorer or weaker reputations that were able to take advantage of this feature.
In conclusion, any small business that considers to recruit online, and having a poor reputation, I would suggest creating your recruitment site based on the content that potential employees would find useful. Suggest any positive experiences employees might have with the business and describe what exactly the job requirements are, what is expected from them and what exactly the job is. Making clear what exactly the job is from the beginning can decrease turnover rates and increase initial performance with the business, or else, new recruits might feel cheated by the business, thus decreasing their performance and increasing turnover rates. In the end, hiring the wrong person might have disastrous consequences for your business by decreasing its reputation and profitability. Thus, a business should not only focus on attracting a big number of candidates, but also being able to Distinguish The Qualified Ones Among Them (Highly Recommended Course).
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