Job hunting on the Internet started out as not much more than World Wide Want ads. The sites attracted a lot of visitors, so more Web companies sprouted up and landed millions of investor dollars only to post newspaper classified ads on the Internet. Few could make money. Many are gone.
“More than $2 billion in venture capital was invested in e-recruiting,” says Phillip Singh, senior director of strategy and business development for Cleveland-based Management Recruiters International Inc. (MRI). “About $100 million of that is left as standing companies.”
Singh says the online recruiting boom made a lot of people at brick-and-mortar recruiting agencies nervous, including at his company. There was little to worry about.
“These companies did a lot of simplistic things without good underlying business practices,” says James Bennett, chief executive at EmployOn Inc. in Euclid, a Web-based recruiting firm. “They didn’t have a broad enough offering and couldn’t offer employers good candidates.”
All that has changed. Recruiters and job placement services now offer many on-line tools not only for the job seeker, but for the company owner as well. While employers now get flooded with more resumes than ever, the quality of candidates is better and the process moves much faster. Firms are trying to make the task even easier.
EmployOn’s Candidate Identification system allows employers and recruiters to find relevant resumes from the millions posted on the Web. Its ClientMatch system lets recruiters match a resume with all the jobs posted on the Web. Bennett says EmployOn will soon offer more services including a tracking system for business owners to log a job candidate from the resume screening to the job interview to the offer and all the calls between.
“It’s an exciting time,” says Bennett. “The growth in this industry is there, but not everybody will be to capitalize on it.”
MRI’s BrilliantPeople.com site focus is confidentiality. Candidates can post their resumes without worrying that their boss will view it. Some of the major sites, like Monster.com, don’t offer that feature, Singh says. MRI prides itself in offering the jobs that only recruiters know about.
On the back-end, MRI’s RecruiterVillage.com, lets recruiters access those candidates’ resumes and share job seekers with each other.
In today’s job market, 75 percent of people who are online have used the Internet to find a job, and 60 percent say they’re going to do it again on their next search. Even with these tools, the human interaction is still what sells the candidate on the job, says Singh.
“People aren’t pieces of steel,” he says. “We don’t have bar codes on our heads. People have families, they have choices to make, and they’re not necessarily going to take job just because of the money. The process has kind of come full circle.”
How to reach: EmployOn, (216) 502-5500 or www.employon.com; Management Recruiters International, (216) or www.BrilliantPeople.com.
