Universities benefit from online recruiting process

The eRecruiting.com software is currently installed at more than 125 schools, according to the experience inc. Website.

Among these are Brown, Georgetown, Harvard and the University of Notre Dame.

Harvard, in its first year with the full eRecruiting.com service, has been pleased with the system, according to the university's recruiting director Judy Murray.

Murray said that, despite a few minor problems, the students have responded well to the software. "We have more students participating in the program," she said. "Some of them may be students that might otherwise not have participated."

Murray said, however, that the use of eRecruiting took away from some of her office's interaction with the students. "You lose that contact," she explained. "We're trying to figure out a way that we don't lose the contact with everybody."

Murray said Harvard sends hard copies of the students' resumes to companies rather than submitting them online. "There are a lot of companies who prefer to receive the hard copy rather than printing it out," she said.

Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, director of career services at Princeton, said that while she has not heard companies complain about receiving documents online, in a few cases companies had been unable to download the documents.

"We send it online unless a company has a problem and isn't able to pull it down," she said. "We would then print off the hard copies and send the hard copies directly to them."

Georgetown, which also began using eRecruiting.com this fall, now has about 1,100 students using the system, according to the school's recruiting manager Denise Douglas. "We did have an in-house system before we started using eRecruiting, but it didn't allow us to do the resume collection piece of it," she said.

Douglas said that some minor bugs in the system caused many of the schools that started using eRecruiting in the fall, including Georgetown, to have problems with it.

Since the problems have been fixed, she said, she has been happy with the software.

"Crimson continued to have excellent customer support," she said. "Now the feedback we're getting is that students do really like the system."