E-recruiting
Also called:electronic recruiting, online recruiting, digital recruiting, e-recruitment
The case for keeping the term
E-recruiting still turns up often enough in searches, HR-department names, and certification syllabi that it’s worth defining rather than pretending it vanished. TechTarget’s definition states it plainly: an umbrella term for any electronic-based recruiting activity, from a careers page to an applicant tracking system (ATS) to AI-assisted screening. Twenty-odd years ago, that umbrella did real work. It separated a company running newspaper classifieds from one posting to a website, and the difference was worth a name.
Why the term stopped doing useful work
The distinction TechTarget names above has quietly dissolved. Once, in their words, “virtually all recruiting today is conducted online,” calling that fact out stopped separating anything from anything else. What used to be one bucket split into practices with their own metrics and their own vendor categories: an ATS for managing the applications themselves, recruitment marketing for building an audience before a role opens, mobile recruiting for the phone-shaped version of the same application, AI in recruiting for the machine-learning layer on top of any of them. Each has its own literature now. “E-recruiting” describes none of them specifically.
The one place the umbrella held on intact is German HR. The University of Bamberg’s “Recruiting Trends” study, an annual survey of Germany’s largest employers running since 2003, still frames its year-over-year comparisons around “E-Recruiting” as a single category, and its first edition correctly predicted the shift it measures: online job portals held 52.4% of the recruiting-channel mix in 2003 and 68.1% by 2012. That is a live, checkable academic use of the term, twenty-plus years running, not a museum piece.
Where we land on it
Disclosure first: Join sells the specific pieces that used to sit under this umbrella, sold and priced as one connected product rather than as “e-recruiting,” so we have an obvious interest in the specific-term framing. Given that, our honest read is that the term survives mainly where naming things is slow and where using them is fast: an “E-Recruiting-Manager:in” title on a DACH org chart, a module heading in an HR-certification course. A job title changes when someone signs off on it. The vocabulary a recruiter reaches for changes on its own schedule, one specific practice at a time, which is why the title outlives the term it was built on. If a search for “e-recruiting” brought you here, the answer you actually want almost certainly lives under one of the four terms above.
Where Join fits
Join doesn't ship anything called "e-recruiting." Multiposting, the careers page, screening, and interview scheduling are separate, connected surfaces in one account — which is closer to how the category actually works now than one umbrella product ever was.
