August 4, 1997

Online Recruiting The Net is a good place to look for tech-savvy people, but it has limitations By Kate Maddox with Marianne Kolbasuk McGee he Internet is a great place to find IS professionals. But just like traditional recruiting, it takes a combination of methods to be successful. That's why businesses looking for tech-savvy employees use online job boards, newsgroups, and their own company Web sites to find the best people. "Companies that don't make use of this technology will be left in the dust," says Richard Taylor, managing partner at Taylor-Rogers & Associates, an IT executive search firm in Stamford, Conn., that has placed executives and other IT staff people that were contacted online. Not surprisingly, technology companies are among the employer s that most actively use the Web to recruit. Silicon Graphics Inc., for example, finds 20% to 30% of its new hires through online recruiting. Silicon Graphics posts job listings on job boards CareerMosaic and IntelliMatch , on Yahoo! and other search engine sites, in the classified sections of online newspapers, and in Internet newsgroups. Despite success with these methods, Silicon Graphics says they have limitations. "I am not convinced that job sites right now are necessarily the best places to find the more highly competitive kind of job seeker," says Eric Lane, director of worldwide staffing for the Mountain View, Calif., company, which plans to hire 3,200 people this year. "Someone who is recruited a lot probably won't take time to fill out extensive forms on the Web," Lane adds, referring to sites such as IntelliMatch that require candidates and employers to fill out profiles so the service can better match up the two. Other companies, however, say they like the more sophisticated sites such as IntelliMatch because they provide better searching capabilities. That helps with openings that arise in a department where a job seeker would not ordinarily look, says Dennis Moore, VP of strategic Web applications technology at Oracle, which is partnering with IntelliMatch in an online job fair. "If you're a data-base administrator, you might not be looking in the postings for the sales department, which may need a database administrator," Moore says. Oracle, which plans to hire 8,000 people this year, also lists jobs on CareerMosaic and the online sites of the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle . The best way to find recruits is still through employee referrals, Moore says, the electronic version of which is posting listings on the corporate intranet. About 8,500 Oracle employees, nearly one-third of the company's staff, log on to the intranet each week to retrieve job postings, he says, adding, "You'll always get the best recruits there." Silicon Graphics, meanwhile, realizes its greatest online success by pointing recruits to its public Web site . "I'm less interested in posting to a lot of job boards than I am in linking to various sites that people go to to find out about their career," says Lane. "We are doing everything we can to differentiate ourselves, so that if the job search doesn't work out now, the candidate will remember us for a job that might be available in a year," Lane adds. However, even companies that use the Internet heavily for recruiting say it has its downside. "There's no way you can interview a person aggressively over the Internet," says Darwin Chang, chief technology officer at computer monitor maker Mag Innovision Co. He recalls hiring a technical marketing specialist after interviews online, on the phone, and in person following an initial job- board contact . But the company probably didn't interview the candidate in person as well as it should have, Chang says, and the hire eventually was asked to leave. Another disadvantage, says Marlene McIntyre, president of McIntyre Management Resources, a job recruiter in Hamilton, Ontario, is that many resumés show up time after time. "A lot of people are flooding the market with resumés, and you have to wonder how employable some of them are," she says. "Still, the services are in their infancy and will likely become more sophisticated in time." See related story " Find An IS Job Online ." Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Pag e

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