Recruitment and human resources managers in Irish businesses are having a harder time finding and hiring the right personnel for jobs than five years ago, according to a new survey. Yet two thirds of them do not yet use the Internet for recruitment, it says.

The anomaly is that 67 per cent of Irish managers said they already had the technology in place to help them recruit online compared to 47 per cent in the UK and 58 per cent in France according to the David Lewis Consultancy study, a British-based organisation.

It found 80 per cent of Irish companies are experiencing difficulty in recruiting the right people compared to 68 per cent in Germany, 50 per cent in the UK and 19 per cent in France.

Using the Internet to recruit can generate cost savings of between 35 and 45 per cent for companies, according to Mr Simon Roberts, general manager of Personics Europe who commissioned the independent study.

The world-wide market for Web-based recruiting is currently valued at around $1 billion (#1.04 billion), but a study by US investment firm Thomas Weisel Partners estimated that it will grow to around $30 billion in a few years.

Mr Pat Hawes, head of the IT recruitment division at Richmond recruitment said that over the last 12 months, use of the Internet for job seeking in Ireland had increased tenfold.

He said that up to 75 per cent of people recruited for the IT industry are found through the Internet and more and more money was being invested by companies in e-recruitment.

Reluctance to use the Internet, may be due to the pace at which the jobs market has changed, but Irish employers will have to move quickly if they are to secure the best recruits.

Ms Caroline Taylor of the International Quality and Production centre, which is holding a conference on e-recruiting at the Alexander Hotel in Dublin next week, said Internet recruitment slashes costs and recruiting time.

She said one of the many advantages it offers is that it attracts passive job seekers with recruitment companies now trying to attract such candidates, through advertising on leisure, and entertainment websites.

Internet recruitment systems can also sift through and filter the huge number of applications received for posts and isolate the best candidates avoiding much of the usual paperwork, she said.