Online employment advertising has proven to be cost-effective, with an average cost to hire of $152 via Web ads, compared with $1,383 using traditional methods, according to the Thomas Weisel report.

But that can be a double-edged sword. Echoing the complaint of recruiters, Aberdeen Group analyst Karen Moser notes that resumé flow has increased dramatically, making it harder to search for desirable candidates. Finding the gems in a pile of sand, she says, is "quite the Herculean task."

Brenda Pitisci, senior technical recruiting manager for the Tampa, Fla., district of IT consulting firm Ajilon Services Inc., says, "If you're not careful, you can spend hours and hours and work 10 times harder."

Never before has access for candidates and clients been so great, says Pete Masalin, president and CEO of HRLogix Inc., an Austin, Texas, recruiting support startup. There's instant access to the jobs companies post, and candidates can respond directly and immediately. "The challenge is to be able to respond quickly to those candidates--whoever responds fastest will get the best candidates."

But that can be expensive, says Reginna Burns, president of the Society for Human Resource Management's High-Tech Net. The best way for companies to proceed, says the HR director at AT&T in Basking Ridge, N.J., is to come up with some automated way to process the resumés--to filter the noise that seems to be an inevitable part of Internet-mediated transactions.

That filtering is most easily done at the front end. If potential candidates can be induced to declare their interest by going to the Web site of the hiring company, they can be asked to input data about themselves directly into its databases. That information is then in a form the company can use for a preliminary evaluation. It's the difference between producing a profile in the hiring company's format and submitting an applicant-crafted resumé.

Cigna Corp., the Philadelphia insurance company, has changed the way it processes job applications from college students and graduates, according to Andrew Adams, assistant VP of university relations. Cigna once accepted faxed or mailed resumés that then had to be scanned in, cleaned up, and the contents parsed into database fields. The company now promotes its Web and E-mail addresses. In that way, the increasing volume of job submissions can be channeled directly into Cigna's electronic system, an online service supplied and hosted by HireSystems Inc. of Waltham, Mass., and San Mateo, Calif., and then shared with hiring managers.

Beyond the initial filtering, screening of candidates is done by the managers rather than by technology tools. Adams says that last year, Cigna looked at computer systems to evaluate candidate fit, but didn't think they were yet ready; however, he says he expects the company to revisit the question.

Several companies are joining the flurry of Web recruiting. "Everything is geared in the direction of getting traffic to our Web site," says Mark Minichiello, director of North American recruiting for Nortel Networks Corp., the networking products company.

For example, the company buys Web banners on sites visited by potential candidates. But here also, screening of the data entered at the site is done by recruiters. "We use a sophisticated resumé-screening system for pulling out the string set for a particular text--a particular school, say," he says. "But when you get into real life, into who's a good fit, that's a human job."

The operators of many of the job boards on the Web recognize that merely aggregating resumés and funneling them (at a price) to hiring companies isn't a business model with long-term viability. One response is to begin to build questionnaires into the job-seeker registration process that will provide data business clients can use to prequalify candidates. Another is for the Web sites or the hiring enterprises to partner with companies that will evaluate applicants.

One of those companies is Select International in Pittsburgh. Christopher Klinvex, Select's director of international operations and alliances, says the use of Web forms feeding applicant information into fields in a database is becoming common. But that data, he says, is just "tickets to the ballpark--to screen out people who won't work night shifts or don't have the necessary mechanical, maintenance, or IT programming background."

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Illustration by Ellen Weinstein
Photo of Minichiello by Steve Sherman