Sustainable e-Recruiting Portals: How to Motivate Applicants to Stay Connected throughout their Careers?

Since most e-recruiting portals suffer from outdated applicant profiles and receive little user return as soon as applicants have found a new job, in this study, the authors explore how to motivate applicants to keep their profiles up-to-date and stay connected with one specific recruiting portal throughout their careers. The authors interviewed applicants, system analysts and programmers of an Austrian e-recruiting portal. Narratives showing striking differences between these three stakeholders’ interpretation of system requirements for long-term usage are discussed. The identified requirements point to niche recruiting: integrating social network and community features for specified user segments sharing a similar social identity and fostering pre-existing offline ties among users for career purposes. Implications are sketched for more sustainable e-recruiting research, design and development.