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March 20, 2000

Recruiters Embrace The Internet
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Illustration by Ellen Weinstein

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Recruiters Discover Diverse Value In Web Sites (2/7/00)

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EETimes Recruiters scramble to find software engineers (3/6/00)

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The next phase in evaluation, he says, is a set of questions, delivered via the Web and scored instantly, that examines the candidate's values, personality, intelligence, and ability to use that intelligence in simulated job situations.

Online hiring took root first among technology companies and professionals. It has spread rapidly, but the results of a Society for Human Resource Management survey confirm the widespread belief that recruiters use the Web more often for midlevel managerial and professional jobs than for either line or high-level executive positions.

If there is a big loser in this migration of recruitment to the Web, it is the classified section of daily newspapers. Virtually every recruiter and hiring manager interviewed is cutting back on newspaper advertising. As Dudley Brown, managing director for BridgeGate LLC, a search firm in Irvine, Calif., says, "Those guys have created a bigger, faster newspaper without ink on the fingers."

The size and nature of the ads being placed is changing as well. Says Nortel's Minichiello, "The way we use newspapers now is to maintain our presence in a particular geographic market space, and also to trigger traffic to our Web sites." In the past, he says, ads were full-page; now the same ad is half the size, listing just job titles rather than the full job description--which is on the Web.

Pentawave Inc. is a Scottsdale, Ariz., company that helps newspapers compete with job boards by getting into that business themselves. The company's president and CEO, David Frenkel, also says employment classifieds have been hit hard. In 1999, he says, newspaper revenue from every category of classifieds other than employment climbed; recruiting ads were down by 10%, or about $700 million. And, he says, classified dollars are the highest gross-margin revenue available to newspapers.

Not all recruiters have joined the ranks of online recruiters, however. Judy Kramer, owner of Remark Staffing Specialists, a Cambridge, Mass., recruiting firm, says she still uses newspaper advertising, the telephone, and personal contacts. "I find the old methods of recruiting are still the most effective way to identify the best candidates to work with," she says. "All of my networking, database building, etc., is done by telephone. E-mail comes into play after my initial contact is made.

"Today I advertise exclusively in the Sunday Boston Globe, which does post all help-wanted ads on its Boston.com Web site," she says. "Ninety percent of the responses I get are directly from the print ads."

Photo by Alan Blaustein Still, if technology companies are any indication of where recruitment is going, newspapers are in even bigger trouble than appears to be the case right now. James Wright, director of recruiting for ThinkLink Inc., a unified messaging vendor in San Francisco, says, "I can't envision putting an ad in the Sunday classifieds--for anything."

At its current stage of evolution, E-recruitment describes a Web-database front end that's grafted onto what remains a pretty traditional process. And it's likely many of the traditional players will remain contenders for some time to come.

"I don't believe the person-to-person or high-level executive-search firms will be done away with," says Aberdeen Group's Moser. Their value, particularly for filling executive positions, is what it always has been: the ability to use their contacts and personal networks to locate candidates who aren't actively seeking new jobs.

As the job boards have demonstrated, the identification of prospective candidates is a function that can be sliced away from search firms. But there will be continued demand for headhunters who do the ferreting out, the qualifying, the interviewing, and ultimately, the negotiating for new hires--especially if they have learned how to add the Web to their toolkits.

Says Neil Fox, VP and CIO of executive search firm Management Recruiters International, "Recruiting is definitely a contact sport."

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