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Even in today's tight labor market, only a handful of big employers are trying to capture the attention of prospective job candidates by using sophisticated online job recruiting tools requiring greater bandwidth.
But online recruiting company executives expect demand for such services to grow as more job hunters access the Internet via high-speed services such as DSL, cable modems or fixed wireless broadband.
Early on, the speculation was that recruiting would need broadband capacity to accommodate job candidates who would post 20-megabyte video interviews, a sort of self-produced advertising, as part of their resumes.
"It turns out no one really does that. No one takes the time to do it," says Owen Medd, chief technology officer at CareerSite Corp., an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based company powering about 80 career Web sites for newspapers, regional job boards and specialized fields of employment. "It's going to come from the other side. It's really the employers that are desperate for people, and it's a sales job on their part to say, 'look how good we are.'"
The number of career-oriented Web sites soared to about 40,000 and job listings rose to an estimated 110 million annually by the end of 2000. The average resume is posted about five times, while each job listing is distributed to about 11 sites, according to a recent report on electronic recruiting trends by industry tracker Interbiznet. Monster.com and Hotjobs.com, the two largest Web sites, together currently offer about 600,000 job listings.
The sheer numbers make it harder for employers in fierce competition for workers to stand out in a Web site's list of hundreds of companies. The most likely broadband application in recruiting, at least in the near-term, is a streaming video presentation that brings company information, such as a campus tour, to life better than flat text, recruiting executives say.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the largest financial services and brokerage companies, gives potential recruits a chance to see 360-degree views of its equities trading and exchange floors. Consumer products manufacturer Procter and Gamble Co. intersperses employee comments within a fast-paced video presentation highlighting the various aspects of its business.
"The infrastructure's been a big bottleneck for a lot of home users to take advantage of these kinds of things," says Steven Pollock, co-founder and president of WetFeet.com, a San Francisco company that helps employers and organizations create online recruiting sites. Pollock expects employer demand for more sophisticated broadband technology to grow as higher connection speeds become more widely available.
Online recruiting is rapidly challenging the traditional source of information about job openings: daily newspaper classified advertisements. The online employment industry is expected to generate annual sales of $7.1 billion within five years, according to Forrester Research. By 2004, companies will spend an average 42 percent of their recruiting budgets for online services.
For operators of online career sites, the challenge is to manage their inventories of job listings and candidate resumes. For now, the inventories mostly are small HTML and .pdf files, which are handled with easily farms of computer servers. CareerSite, for example, recently moved its servers to a UUNet co-location facility near New York to give it room to grow its business and assure increased Internet access reliability.
Although companies are becoming more aware of what rich media can do as consumer access expands, the push for video components in recruiting remains slow. So far, it's limited to large clients that initially may have existing video presentations that can be adapted for Internet use.
Only about eight of more than 100 WetFeet client companies have gone to the extra expense of posting video interviews/presentations. "Most of the people who are hiring are small-to-medium businesses that don't have the budgets to put together things like that," says CareerSite's Medd. Added to the cost of preparing the video message is the posting fee. Some job boards may waive that fee initially to convince a client to add the feature.
Still, the early results are encouraging, says WetFeet's Pollock. Companies with video interviews on his company's site tend to get a good bit more traffic than similar companies with non-video sites.
Before company human resource recruiters decide to add video, they need to develop a strategy built around the technology, Pollock says. "Do you want to attract people who might be interested and give them a little bit of a flavor, or do you want to appeal to candidates who are well into the interview and selection process and give them deep information around certain things?"
WetFeet recommends keeping presentations to 10 minutes or less, an important consideration given the continually diminishing attention spans of job candidates. Monster.com said its 4.4 million individual visitors in September, the last month for which data is available, looked at nearly 39 pages of information during an average visit that lasted less than 30 minutes.
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