Publication Date: February 14, 1997

Technology Changes Nature of Recruitment Advertising

By Ken Shulman

John Doe and Rob Deer, top-flight medical technicians at County Hospital in Bigtown, USA, are both looking for new jobs. On Sunday, John Doe scans the Bigtown Bulletin's classified page and sees an opening in management at Bigtown Health. He prints out a cover letter and resume and drops them in the mailbox for Monday morning. But a day earlier, Rob Deer sees the advertisement on the Bulletin's online recruitment site, and sends his resume in by e-mail. He also performs a keyword search in the Bulletin's recruitment database, and finds two job openings that John Doe had missed.

"The job seeker who has anything on the ball is beginning to learn that he can gain a substantial edge if he looks for his job online," says Gerry Crispin, East Coast vice president of the Chicago-based Shaker Advertisement company and co-author with Greg Mailer of the book Career Crossroads, a review of 475 online recruitment sites. "Not only can he respond more promptly than the traditional searcher. He can also use the online technology to find opportunities that he might otherwise have overlooked."

With the rapid growth of the Web and changes in database technology, online recruitment advertising has evolved from an interesting novelty to a dynamic force in the job search arena. It not only is empowering people in search of work, but also it is changing the way employers fill vacant positions. "The online element allows us to cast a wider net while also narrowing our focus," says Sharon Ruwart, recruitment advertising manager at the San Jose Mercury News. The San Jose area "has an extremely high concentration of high-tech employers. Many people want to work here. We receive replies from places like Turkey, India and Kazakhstan. These people are almost always highly qualified. But they never would have seen these jobs were they not posted on the 'Net."

For employers, online recruitment can be an effective screening tool, particularly at the early stages of recruiting. "The whole idea of a resume search is to get to the point where you can approach the next selection hurdle, to winnow down your list of candidates," says Crispin. "Online and database technology are a very efficient and cost-effective way of doing this. But very few posts are going to be filled exclusively from the data received in an online resume."

High-Tech Employment -- and More

Anecdotal and survey evidence suggest that the majority of jobs posted online are technical or computer related, and that the majority of job seekers are computer or high-technology professionals. Yet the demographics of Web recruitment are changing. An examination of job searches executed on January 26 on Career Path, a media company consortium that posts ads from more than 150 newspapers, showed that 25 percent of the applicants were looking for engineering or computing positions. Still, 5 percent looked under the management category; 5 percent searched the health and medical listings, and another 5 percent scanned the sales database. Career Path says it averages nearly nine million hits and 3.5 million user searches each month.

"It is taking longer for non-technical jobs to catch on to the online recruiting trend," says Greg Bradley, webmaster at Career Web in Norfolk, Va. "Right now, employers know that the majority of the people on the Web are technically able. But this, too, is changing, and will change even more with the spread of Web TV. That's when we'll see more blue collar jobs posted online."

There are a host of online recruitment services, almost all using powerful NT, Alpha or Unix servers and sophisticated database technologies from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. User queries can be answered in seconds, even for job seekers connecting with 28.8 modems. Jeff Taylor, president of The Monster Board, a leading job-search service, reports that his site has seen hits increase from 10 million to 30 million per month since August 1996. He is ramping his system to handle 100 times its current traffic level.

The Monster Board provides resume storage, an entertaining interface, and an active database that is constantly updated. Its "Jobba The Hunt" search engine automatically sweeps the database six times a day, and immediately notifies listed job seekers via e-mail of any new opportunity for which they may be qualified. The site also helps job seekers to conduct research, providing one-page "folio" descriptions for 4,000 of the site's 5,000 listed employers. In many cases, there are also links to the employer's site.

A New Realm for Media Companies

Recruitment services such as The Monster Board and Career Web do compete with the newspaper industry, which sees online recruitment advertising as a way to leverage its future. Many veteran newspaper recruiters believe that print still possesses substantial recognition capital in the classified area, and that the battle for online job seekers is theirs to lose. "I think that the newspaper will always remain one of the main sources for job recruitment," says Andrew Vogel, recruitment advertising manager at the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. "The challenge today for papers is not to just sit back on their laurels, but to actively explore as many recruitment options as possible."

The two Detroit papers charge customers an extra dollar to put their recruitment advertisements on the Detroit newspaper site. That same dollar also posts the job announcement on Career Path, owned jointly by eight media heavyweights: the Times Mirror Co.; Gannett Co., Inc.; Knight-Ridder, Inc.; The Hearst Corp., the Tribune Co.; Cox Communications; The New York Times Co.; and The Washington Post.

"We are significant for our advertisers because of our sheer numbers," says Mike Forrest, founder of Career Path. "We already have over one million people registered at our site. The ease of operation at our site makes it very efficient for people looking for work. And it also makes things easier on the human resources people. One problem with traditional newspaper advertising is that they hate you for too few resumes, and they also hate you if you send them too many resumes. With the database functions and the sheer size of our membership, we can provide the proper number of candidates and know that they all meet the client's basic criteria."

While online recruiting seems destined to expand, it also seems destined to coexist in some way with traditional recruitment methods. Some newspaper recruitment professionals predict that in five years print will be offered as a quaint perk to those who choose to advertise online. Yet the majority of recruitment professionals foresee a symbiosis between print and electronic recruitment.

"At this stage, they are a really strong partnership," says Ruwart. "The newspaper is still the most effective way of bringing people to the Web recruitment sites. What people should be doing now and in the short-term future is to use the newspapers to print the flashy, eye-catching advertisements that might name the type of positions that the reader will find described in greater detail when he logs onto that employer's recruitment Web site."

Ken Shulman writes from Cambridge, Mass.

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