InformationWeek

Crispin and Mehler, who wrote a reference guide to online job hunting and recruiting called CareerXroads, predict that another 1,000 online job sites will be added this year. IT recruitment will play a significant role in that growth, due to a nationwide technical worker shortage estimated by the U.S. Department of Labor to be nearly 400,000 people.

At Citizens Gas & Coke Utility in Indianapolis, the Web has become critical to IT-recruitment efforts, says employment supervisor Cheryl Smith. "The market for qualified IT people is so tight that we have to use every available resource to fill openings," she says.

Smith at first was wary about Internet job boards. "I'm not a computer person," she says. "I'm in human resources, and I had 'stage fright' using the Net. However, after learning the tools, techniques, and resources to post jobs on different recruiting sites, it made my job a lot easier."

Crispin and Mehler say Techies .com, JobsForProgrammers.com, and Dice.com. are among the leading sites for IT recruitment, but some general job sites--such as Monster.com, Headhunter.net, Careerpath.com, Careermosaic.com, Hotjobs.com, and Jobs-USA.com--list a significant number of IT and computer industry positions.

In fact, some of the large general sites have more openings than the IT-dedicated sites. Headhunter.net, for example, claims to have 50,000 IT job openings online, and a resumé database of 340,000 active job hunters in IT.

Still, most companies view Web job sites as a complement to their recruitment methods rather than a replacement. Companies are using a combination of resources to find qualified IT workers--including their own Web sites, classified ads in newspapers and trade journals, job fairs, on-campus university recruiting, employee-referral incentive programs, and executive search firms.

In addition, there's a substantial number of companies and people looking for jobs who ignore online job sites entirely. According to an April survey of 4,000 executives conducted by BrilliantPeople.com, the online recruiting and career site of Management Recruiters International Inc., only 66% of respondents said their companies advertise openings on Internet job boards. The study also found that most high-level IT executives are reluctant to use job boards to advance their careers, citing confidentiality issues as the prime reason.

Some critics say online job recruitment has grown at an unmanageable rate and often leaves recruiters and candidates unhappy with the whole process. "In many ways, electronic recruiting was seen as a panacea, but it's turned into an exacerbating situation: Recruiters have been inundated with tons of unqualified resumés, and the candidates aren't getting any responses," says Charlene Li, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Li says automatic matching engine technologies used by many sites are insufficient, because they're geared to search for general technology terms such as C++ and Java. She says many applicants are aware of these matching engines and include such terms on their resumés, even if they're inexperienced in those areas. Recruiters are also guilty of manipulating the results of matching engines, she says, and litter their job descriptions with such words hoping they'll attract better candidates, even if the skills aren't entirely relevant to the jobs.

Toni Havlik, a Plano, Texas, Internet recruiter for $25 billion international telecommunications company Alcatel USA, agrees that online job sites don't offer a perfect solution. Her company has 600 IT openings and advertises on seven job boards. "Many of our positions require extensive travel and that turns off some applicants," she says. "Even though we state this explicitly in our ads, we wind up weeding out a lot of people who are simply responding just to get a foot in our door."

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