Online hiring is steadily gaining prominence among India Inc, as this medium helps in reducing costs as well as saving time in activities related to recruitment, feel HR experts.

They also opined that several organisations are looking at online medium as effective channel for sourcing talent.

"Online hiring has picked up in popularity, as it has been vastly used during the first half of this year from January-June," staffing firm TeamLease Services Vice-President (IT Sourcing) Surabhi Mathur-Gandhi told PTI.

Job portal Monster.com Managing Director (India/Middle East/Southeast Asia) Sanjay Modi noted that online hiring activities have increased in recent years.

A recent study by the portal showed that online job opportunities in October this year grew at a robust pace of 22 per cent, as compared to the same period in 2009.

Staffing services firm Ma Foi Randstad Director (Marketing) Aditya Narayana Mishra said that online hiring activities have been picking up and related challenges have also increased.

Mathur-Gandhi stressed that many firms are resorting to online hiring to reduce costs.

"Accuracy, less dependency on human resources for evaluation, almost immediate assessment... have helped many companies move from the traditional testing methodology to a modern one," she added.

Meanwhile, Mishra pointed out that organisations are facing challenges to keep pace with the volume of online applications coming in.

According to Modi, there are also challenges related to hiring online, such as validation of the data provided by jobseekers.

Mishra said that even though many companies believe that online hiring reduces costs, there are 'huge hidden costs associated with the hiring efforts'.

He noted that return on investment is a more appropriate metric than measuring the direct cost of hiring a person, such as fees paid to a recruitment firm and cost of advertisements, he added.