Has modern-day technology improved the recruitment process? If yes, how?

YES.

Technology helps in below tasks:

Manage requisitions

Job posting

Application responses

Applicant tracking

Interviewing

Assessment

Qualification and skill validation

and more!

I think it has improved some areas and exposed weakness in others.

Before I get on my soap box a little about myself.  I have been formally trained in designing job descriptions, creating candidate skills analysis matrices, designing interviewing questions and creating staff succession plans.  Essentially I have been thoroughly trained on the softer side of things that typical IT managers miss out on. 

There are three hats I often wear, Hiring Manager, Job Seeker, and Consultant/Adviser.

Hiring Manager: I have gotten fantastic looking resumes only to find out that the candidates heavily padded their resumes with key words to get ranked higher in the HR Management Systems and Candidate Profiling systems.  Essentially on paper they were perfect, but after bringing them into the interview it was a major disappointment and loss of time.

This is because HR/Recruitment relied far too heavily on the candidate score and they did not do sufficient screening to weed out gamers.

I have greatly appreciated when the candidate systems are linked into the organization to enable automation of job req creation, approval, and the interviewing and selection process.  It is much more efficient than the old way of getting dozens of emails and having to track them in my own filing system.

Job Seeker:  I have found myself having to maintain over a dozen versions of my resume/cv (not including spot customizations) to maintain some level of traction with positions I apply for.  Because I know that most organization employ keyword filtering  technology to increase resume ranks, it is a frustrating to not hear back for positions when I know I am qualified.  Why?  As the job applicant we don't know which key words the software is looking for, and what is important to one company might not be to another.  So it is hit and miss.

As a Consultant/Adviser: I have seen so many poorly created job descriptions that are posted online that I shake my head.  If the job description is not properly written and realistic than finding and staffing the position will be impossible.  Example, I was once staffing a project and the Hiring manager had put a Job Req together that highlighted "Required Skills" so diverse that only GOD could meet them (Networking Expert, Programming Expert, Big Data Expert, deliver presentations, fix code and be on call24/7).  What blew my mind was that it was approved by HR and had been posted online for a month with only1 applicant.

Creating job descriptions is more science than art (as opposed to resumes being more Art than Science).  You can't get every skill in one person, and no one is an expert at everything.  Write the description with tiered levels or "Wants"

Required X years of Y technology

Experience of X years with XYZ or similar technologies

Successful implementation of W portals for up to X concurrent sessions.

Awareness of Software or comparable system

Understanding of new and emerging technologies like .....

Create the Job Description not simply based on the EXACT technology keywords but on transferable skills.  Most often developers or IT engineers are familiar with a technology but they used a different flavor so if a Profiling system does not know that SUSE and RedHat are both Linux, or that PHP is part of LAMP you will miss brilliant candidates.

So in the end, Yes I think they have helped in many ways, and probably made the job of HR professionals and recruiters less intense, but they can be gamed, and miss fantastic candidates if key word ranking is overly relied upon or poorly written job requirements and in sufficient key words are provided.

Yes, definitely it has. Now you can search for your desired skilled candidate via social media and don't need to advertise for the job even. You can get references within minutes via closed ended questions from referees. You can interview the candidate in any part of the world via Skype or any other such media tool.

It has positively improved the recruitment process.

The apparent rise of online recruitment through career sites eg : Bayt.com and social recruitment using websites like (URL removed due to policy violation. Please contact support for further information.) has impacted recruitment in a traditional sense as the recruitment specialist now can match the candidate experience more closely to the JD and take a decision on forwarding the applicant to the next round of the selection process.

The recruitment specialist now has a wider reach and a ready talent pool to select the choice of candidates required this wide reach to tap into a readily available talent pool is due to the effective use of technology.

In addition the rise in the usage of online applicant tracking systems eg: Taleo and new techniques in candidate search like Xray search and boolean operator search techniques have ensured a closer match to job requirements.

In terms of face to face interviews also technology has virtually eliminated geographical distances as there is a wider acceptance of skype based interviews in order to take a call on final selection.

yes it has improved the reqruitment process by making it more smoothly and quite far away from reciving the applicants requests in the office.

1-  The job vacancy posting and easier reach for th maximum number of qualified candidate to apply.

2- The ability to filltering the recived C.Vs depends on the requires and the job keys.

3- The ability to reach the refrences of the candidate by email to check about him/her.

Yes it is..

Best Reason is with prescreeing questions we can have only highly potential candidates for further selection process.

Yes & No

the issue is quite complex...

the SOCIAL MEDIA Websites like: (URL removed due to policy violation. Please contact support for further information.), BAYT.COM

helping a lot to facilitate jobs searching..

but other social medias are saturating the job market with excessive, corrosive informaitons...

 ppl with real skills are not enlisted properly in the social media, so others with good "Social Media" skills are hacking into their spaces & taking off their opportunities...

REALLY PROBLEMATIC....

WHAT DO YOU THINIK?

Technology has improve the way of recruiting today as we have more channel to find applicant and source for talent as well as using company website to post job vacancies.  

Definitely yes,

Few reasons,

1. Manage employee profiles for current/future references

2. Job portals like Bayt, Gulf talent .. just to list a few.. making things very easy and transparent in knowing the job opportunities which best suites the profile.

3. Helps networking in a big big way which is very much necessary in the modern era of career growth.

4. Reduced pain of standing in long queues for landing a job.

5. Have made the life easy for head hunters by taylor made web portals for job advertisements.

These are just few points.. 

Technology rocks and it has a great contribution in the recruitment process. 

It has positively improved the recruitment process.

The apparent rise of online recruitment through career sites eg : Bayt.com and social recruitment using websites like (URL removed due to policy violation. Please contact support for further information.) has impacted recruitment in a traditional sense as the recruitment specialist now can match the candidate experience more closely to the JD

It has in the sense it filled in the gap to communicate with everyone and anyone in the sense that geographical distance isn't a problem anymore. It facilitated the screening process by using filtering methods in the websites. It practically evolved everything into a mechanical sense , but lost the human aspect of believing or knowing that she/he are the right people for the job. Technology transformed the selection process into a point system , while it lost the human interaction of talking, or feeling that she/he are right for the job.