An over reliance on IT systems is hampering the recruitment efforts of many businesses, an expert has claimed.

While a recent KPMG report stated that the use of online application forms was letting more firms carry out their own recruitment, Steve Carter, the managing director of finance recruiter Nigel Lynn, said that online systems often miss the best applicants.

Mr Carter explained that automated recruitment systems sometimes filtered out the best applicants because their CVs failed to contain the right key words.

"You may have the ideal candidate with exactly the right experience for a senior position," he added. "But if there's no human being involved in that first CV filter then the company is going to lose out.

"We're living through what's probably the biggest war for talent we can remember and yet we're making the hiring of key individuals harder by putting processes up as obstacles.

"You can have the most impressive online careers site in the world but getting the right people to visit it is another matter."

Recent reports have suggested that there is a significant shortfall in the number of people training to become IT workers, making recruitment even more important for small firms.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'.