A study of e‐recruitment technology adoption in Malaysia
| Date | 13 March 2009 |
| Published date | 13 March 2009 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/02635570910930145 |
| Pages | 281-300 |
| Author | David Yoon Kin Tong |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
A study of e-recruitment
technology adoption in Malaysia
David Yoon Kin Tong
Faculty of Business & Law, Multimedia University, Melaka, Malaysia
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the employed jobseekers’ perceptions and
behaviours of third-party e-recruitment technology adoption in Malaysia.
Design/methodology/approach – Using the validated modified Technology Acceptance Model
(TAM) without the attitude construct as the core research framework and identifying Perceived
Privacy Risk (PPR), Performance Expectancy (PE), Application-Specific Self-Efficacy (ASSE), and
Perceived Stress (PS) as key external variables that form the research model for the study of
e-recruitment technology adoption.
Findings – The results identify few key determinants to this technology adoption. Moreover, the
weak evidence of the behavioural intention indicates that e-recruitment has not replaced some of the
conventional recruitment methods.
Practical implications – The study implies that the third party e-recruiters’ policy makers and
human resources practitioners need to improve the e-recruitment system and services to attract these
“passive” talented groups of candidates for employment.
Originality/value – The paper provides an insight for human resources practitioners on the
effective use of third-party e-recruitment service provider and the strategy to attract employed
jobseekers for employment.
Keywords Modelling, Onlineoperations, Recruitment, Jobs,Malaysia, Sampling theory
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
In human resource management context, recruitment is a process of sourcing and
acquiring the right applicants to an organization. Essentially, the process involves
seeking and attracting a pool of qualified applicants using various feasible recruitment
methods. The conventional recruitment methods used by organizations consist of
contacting friends or employee referrals, engaging executive search, using newspapers
classified ads, and others. Whenever there are changes in company’s policy,
technology, location, mergers, acquisitions, de-mergers, and employees’ resignation,
this process continues to take place periodically to add, maintain, or re-adjust their
workforce in accordance to the corporate and human resource planning (Tyson and
York, 2000; Cascio, 1998).
As global competition persists and industries becoming more skill intensive, the
recruitment of talent workers becomes essential (Tong and Sivanand, 2005), and
attracting the right applicants at the right time is getting tougher than ever. The use of
conventional recruitment methods no longer suffices and timely to attract sufficient
pool of qualified applicants. Many organizations have turned to adopting sophisticated
recruitment strategies or combining various recruitment methods to attract them
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for the comment on earlier draft.
The study of
e-recruitment
technology
281
Received 14 April 2008
Revised 30 June 2008
Accepted 25 July 2008
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 109 No. 2, 2009
pp. 281-300
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/02635570910930145
(Tong and Sivanand, 2005). For example, by combining newspaper ads with executiv e
search, or employment agencies, and others for recruitment; but this only adds to the
increased of recruitment costs per hire (Pollitt, 2005, 2004).
In early-1990s, with the advancement of internet technology, many have witnessed
the transformation of the conventional recruitment methods to online recruitment
(Joyce, 2002). Some corporate companies even use their web sites to recruit people while
others capitalized this change to become e-recruitment service providers (Dixon, 2000).
This latter “third-party” e-recruitment business thrived to become the secon d most
popular online business besides booking airline tickets, in United States and Europe.
This business trends was later caught up in South-east Asia and Asia Pacific (Labanyi,
2002; Galanaki, 2002; Fisher, 2001; Gomolski, 2000).
The third-party e-recruiters provide services to companies who are interested to use
their web sites for job advertisements and viewing potential applicants’ posted
re
´sume
´s at a fee lower than most conventional recruitment methods. Most e-recruiters
provide free services to applicants or jobseekers to post their re
´sume
´s online in their
databases (Galanaki, 2002). With this free posting, the growth of re
´sume
´s is inevitable.
Millions of re
´sume
´s are posted to famous e-recruitment web sites, becoming a true
market; uncontrolled and unconstrained by geography (Cappelli, 2001).
With the rapid growth of the third-party e-recruitment web sites, this has altered the
way jobseekers are looking for jobs, and the way companies are recruiting them but
little is known of their effects on the labour market. Accordingly, in this study, it leads
to the reviewing and understanding of the job search and information technology (IT)
literatures. Combining these literatures, this study uses the highly validated
Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) developed by Davis (1986) as the research
framework to analyse and understand this considerably new technology adoption for
job search. The spread of this e-recruitment business to South-east Asia, particularly in
Malaysia seemed desirable to test the local jobseekers’ perceptions and experiences on
e-recruitment utilization.
This paper is organized and presented as follows. First, the literatures review
discusses the job search trends and the conceptual model and hypotheses. Second, the
research method is provided. Third, the results are presented. Next, the discussion and
implications, and limitations of the research findings are discussed. Finally, the
conclusion is drawn and recommendations for further study suggested.
Literature review
In the job search literature, Quint and Kopelman (1995) using the Job Search Behaviour
Index (JSBI) asked respondents (59 percent’ employed, 37 percent currently seeking for
employment) to indicate ten dichotomous items (yes or no), whether they had engaged
in ten different job search activities over the past year, predicted job acquisition
success is positively related to the level of job search behaviour. That is, for job
acquisition success, jobseekers’ application must demonstrate three variables:
(1) effortful job acquisition behaviour (motivation);
(2) possession of the requisite job-related knowledge and skills (ability); and
(3) an appropriately focused job acquisition strategy (role direction).
Comparing Quint and Kopelmans’ research, Mau and Kopischke (2001) also used ten
different job search methods on college graduates (N¼11,152) to find out the
IMDS
109,2
282
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