HR in Europe: Billions lost due to lack of digitization

The Swiss cloud software provider jacando recently produced the study "Digitization of HR in Europe" as part of a status quo analysis. More than 1000 career sites of SMEs (50-499 employees) and corporates (500+ employees) from 12 European countries on recruitment topics were examined. One key finding: a lack of digitization leads to a great waste of money in HR departments.

Apply like in the past

But let's start from the beginning. The study "Digitization of HR in Europe" has revealed that despite a wide range of digital options, recruitment processes in European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often still handled as they used to be: For example, more than every 3rd SME still asks for applications in postal form and in 54% of all cases, emails come into play. However, these are then not processed efficiently with an applicant management system, but mainly still manually. Such a system is only used in 14% of the cases - despite a time saving of around 30 minutes per application.

Immense waste of money

It is obvious that this costs companies dearly. With an average of 50 applications per vacancy, this means that 60 million applications are handled inefficiently every year. In man-hours, this amounts to 30 million. And the costs caused by a lack of digitization are immense: In the DACH region alone, 1 billion euros are lost due to a lack of digital application processes - every year!

E-Recruiting in general? Hardly widespread!

A look at other efficient e-recruiting methods, such as the one-click application with the social media profile or mobile recruiting, does not bode well either. With 10% (one-click), respectively 6% (mobile recruiting), these two forms are virtually non-existent. And speaking of mobile: the fact that only 66% of the websites examined are mobile-responsive at all shows that mobile measures are already failing to meet the basic requirements. And what about social recruiting? Social recruiting also suffers from the same problem, because not even every 2nd SME has its own social media account. And thus the most important prerequisite for a successful implementation is missing here as well.

Even the big players still have potential

On the one hand, corporates have significantly more resources and, on the other hand, are virtually forced to digitize due to the large number of vacancies (and corresponding number of applications) for capacity reasons. It is therefore not surprising that they are further ahead than SMEs when it comes to e-recruiting. But even among corporates, there is still potential for digitization: although 99% of career pages are mobile-optimized, applicant management systems are only used in 77% of cases, and social media could also be more widespread at 80%. A deeper look also shows that corporates are only just scratching the surface when it comes to digitalization: The one-click application with the social media profile is only possible in 14% of the cases and the number of companies that enable an application via mobile app can only be counted on one hand.

Digitization? Basic stage

Although digitization is not a new term and it is promoted and supported by numerous programs, it does not yet seem to have arrived in European HR departments, at least in recruitment matters. "Backward" or "basic stage" thus best summarize the current level of digitization in the SMEs studied. Whether this is due to the will to digitize, the knowledge about it, or a lack of resources can only be speculated on for the time being, and further investigation is required for this. However, the fact that digitization of individual subareas would already bring considerable cost savings should be reason enough for all companies to at least give digitization a chance.

In order to learn more about the background and causes of the hesitant digitization, jacando is currently conducting another, larger-scale study together with various partners. The results will be published in spring 2017.   

Source and information: jacando AG