With employers scrambling to find
qualified workers, the media that
announce job openings are prospering –
and none more so than the thousands of
job boards proliferating on the World
Wide Web.
By some estimates, 11,000 job boards link employees with employers
today. And according to Forrester Research Inc., company spending on
online job recruitment will leap from $105 million in 1998 to $1.7
billion by 2003. By then, Forrester predicts, 100 percent of big
companies, 60 percent of medium sized companies, and 20 percent of small
firms will be advertising there.
By comparison, Forrester estimates that just 15,000 of the nation’s
six million companies are luring job seekers over the Web today.
But few question that the Internet is fundamentally changing how job
seekers and recruiters approach their work. Newspapers no longer
dominate. Anyone with access to the Internet can now visit sites
enabling them to search for jobs by discipline, region, salary, and
other criteria. Some, like the Monster Board at monster.com, have
technology that actually do the searching for you.
And employers who advertise with these job boards – and make the
sites profitable – now have instant access to databases filled with
resumes.
“It’s part of the mix of how people recruit. Is it going to replace
job fairs? Probably not – there still needs to be the personal contact,”
said Richard Ashodian, marketing director for CareerCity, a Holbrook,
Mass.-based online job board. “It allows the employer to reach (job
seekers) anywhere in the world.”
Job boards differ in their approaches to making connections. But most
all allow the job seeker to scan job openings and post resumes for free.
Employers, who may change or update their own job postings daily, then
contact people with the skills they’re looking for.
But before you plunge in, and divulge your resume and other personal
data to a job board, it’s important to know where that information is
going, said Dimitri Boylan, chief operating officer of hotjobs.com,
which, like some other job boards, allows consumers to direct resumes to
specific companies within the job board’s database – while preventing
their information from being seen by companies they are not interested
in working for.
This is particularly helpful if the job seeker’s current employer
belongs to the hotjobs database, Boylan indicated.
“You can really control who has access to your resume,” Boylan said,
adding that those who post their resumes without checking to see how the
job board manages their information, “should also be willing to put
(their) resume on a lamp post, because it’s the equivalent.”
Driving the growth of job boards is the overall demand for qualified
workers, which has led companies to go to unusual lengths – and
advertise in as many mediums as possible – to land the right people. And
the right people, sensing the desperation of these employers, are
considering their career moves carefully, said Michael McGill, owner the
Job Board, a year-old Massachusetts-based job site.
“The employer is really having a difficult time finding the right
applicants.that’s why you’re seeing a growing number of job sites –
companies are demanding it,” McGill said. “People are just happy with
their jobs, they’re not making moves. And those who are waiting for the
right offer before they jump ship.”
But adding to that caution, Ashodian indicated, is the economy’s recent
slowdown. Only about a quarter of those who surf over to his site, he
said, actually post a resume – which Ashodian said was an industry
standard.
“The balance of the community sort of float in and out of the site,
rather than leave a resume,” he said. “Right now, with the market being
a little bit more (questionable) people are getting a little bit more
cautious of putting out to the public what their status is.”
Still, many in the online job industry believe that the Internet will
someday replace newspaper job recruitment. The Web, they say, is cheaper
for advertisers, more interactive, allows both parties to access more
information, and reaches a far greater audience.
Boylan went as far as to predict that newspaper classified job adds will
all but vanish within five years. The Internet also empowers job
searchers by giving them more flexibility than they would have if they
had to wait for the Sunday newspaper, said Linda Natansohn, vice
president of business and product development for the Monster Board.
“Millions of users are poised to come online, particularly in the next
two years,” Natansohn said. “One of the things the Internet lets people
do is sort of passively look for a job – you can make sure there’s
nothing better out there without significant effort.”
But not so fast, said Charles Diederich, director of recruitment
advertising for the Newspaper Association of America. Classified job ads
are a $7 billion industry in the United States now, a figure which he
said includes job postings in the print and online versions of American
newspapers. He added that that number is up from $5.128 billion in 1995.
“I’d love to take that bet,” Diederich said, when told of Boylan’s five-
year prediction, citing the industry’s growth.
Because of the demand for jobs, he said, the ‘help wanted’ ads that work
well in a weaker economy are not producing the number of responses
companies need, prompting them to use other media, such as billboards,
radio, and the Internet, more readily.
But Diederich added that he expects market share of the job advertising
business to shift toward Internet sites, and that newspaper dominance of
the market will continue to erode. But he refuted the notion that
classified job listings will become extinct any time soon. Television,
for example, did not lead to the extinction of the radio, he said.
“Certainly it’s (the Internet) here to stay, but as far as pulling money
away from newspapers, I don’t see that yet,” he said. “I think that’s
too easy to say, and history just doesn’t bear it out.”
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