Does monster.com have any byte? An exploratory dialogue

Dot.coms were lauded in 1999. Dot.bombs were savaged in 2000. Dot.survivors linger in 2001. Despite this roller-coaster history the recruitment industry has gone on-line and digital. Fuelled by claims of access to “a gold standard workforce” organisations are urged by the HR industry press to get on line to improve their recruitment strategies. Puzzled by the proliferation of hyperbole and the rhetoric of cyberrecruitment, we, two management academics decided to become participants in this brave new world of ecruitment. Despite the promises of a sophisticated and effective method of attracting the best candidates for employers, as potential employees we found the on-line interaction to be frustrating and time-wasting. We spent hours attempting to respond to the on line prompts at various job sites and we experienced the decision protocols underlying the web-based recruitment programs to be so immutable we could not even succeed in registering our interest in any advertised position. This experience leads us into a dialogue as we both sought to understand our personal responses to the dissonance between the rhetoric of e-cruitment and our reality. Reflecting her theoretical bias towards a psychoanalytic perspective, Jan asked ‘What in the process of recruitment is being defended against by the adoption of e-cruitment methods?’ Sue’s discourse perspective led her to a different question. ‘What are the disciplinary effects of the discourses surrounding emerging social practices such as e-cruitment?’ In the spirit of co-operative inquiry that encompasses a both/and approach we use these two critical theoretical perspectives to analyse the construction of ‘e-cruitment’ as a digital tool for attracting and selecting human resources. We intend to hold a dialogue that includes theoretical insights from both these perspectives to broaden our understanding of the issues.

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