The Internet As Job Market

The Internet As Job Market

Judy Olian

(Judy Olian is Dean of Penn State's Smeal College of Business and a leading expert in strategic human resources management.)

Mary Jones, an Internet search whiz at a Fortune 1000 Company, spends her day surfing the net. She gets paid to troll for recruitment prospects from the home pages of competitors, searching corporate directories for professionals whose job title fits her company's recruiting needs. She's the new breed of industrial spy.

The Internet has enabled a myriad of enhancements to the efficiency of job markets. Commercial job boards like monster.com , hotjobs.com , or headhunter.net serve as matchmakers between recruiting companies and sometimes anonymous job seekers, unbounded by geography. Niche sites like computerjobs.com or accounting.com zero in on certain professional job markets.

Recognizing the power of the Internet to reach job seekers directly, corporate websites have expanded to include a careers site as part of the company's web presence. According to iLogos Research, 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies use their web presence to attract applicants. In total, these companies post about 75,000 job vacancies on their corporate career websites each year.

Job postings on the Internet, whether through job boards or company websites, are second only to newspaper advertising according to the Society for Human Resources - SHRM Magazine. Eighty-two percent of respondents to SHRM's 2002 Recruiter Survey indicated that they do online job advertising. Respondents reported that the quality of applicants through online advertising was third to newspaper ads and employee referrals.

Internet recruiting is not just for entry-level positions. Certain job boards such as executivesonly.com or execunet.com are restricted to higher-level executive positions, requiring certain years of experience and executive salaries above a threshold, generally about $100,000. Given the layoff pains suffered in the executive and professional ranks and the national scope of recruiting and moving for such jobs, online executive searches are becoming the norm.

Why use the Internet for recruitment?

• It's a lot cheaper. A small ad in the Washington Post costs $400-$1000, compared to less than $200 on WashingtonPost.com . Advertising through a corporate career web is free.
• Online advertising is much less constrained by space and word limitations compared to newspapers. On their own website, corporations are free to describe job opportunities and expound on the virtues of working for the firm.
• You'll reach a broader, potentially national audience. According to SHRM, 96 percent of job seekers use the web as an element of their search.
• Commercial job boards, and over 70 percent of corporate career websites, accept only online resumes. The online resumes can be searched and screened for key words, processed and forwarded rapidly to the hiring offices, and archived for later vacancies if not used immediately.
• The process is faster—online ads are posted immediately rather than after a few days, and applicants can be given immediate feedback to accelerate interactions with preferred candidates.
• For organizations seeking computer savvy applicants, online advertising accomplishes preliminary screening since it reaches only Internet users.
• Most job boards permit anonymous applications, potentially enlarging the pool of qualified applicants.
• The Internet can be used as a "pull" strategy, approaching applicants through directory information on corporate websites and inviting them into the recruiter's career web.

Applicants responding to vacancies posted on corporate career websites may be revealing more active interest in a particular company, and greater likelihood of a successful match on both sides. The downside of corporate websites is that they can be flooded with resumes from unqualified or unsuitable candidates because of the ease of online submissions. Unless the company has keyword search tools, the cost of screening volumes of resumes swamps the benefits. Moreover, many applicants will be sending their information into a black hole, never to hear again from the company. That isn't good PR.

The future portends a fundamental shift to the Internet as the dominant job market exchange, with continuing decline in print job ads for all but highly specialized positions. This doesn't bode well for newspapers and general interest magazines. It's not surprising that Careerbuilder.com is a joint venture of the Gannett Company with Knight Ridder and Tribune, yet another example of convergence between print media and the Internet. As they say, if you can't beat' em, join 'em.