February 14, 1999 BUSINESS
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  • Job searching online
    By TRACY WENZEL CONNER, Daily News Business Editor


    Job hunting has gone high-tech.

    Start your search engine, and you're bound to find all sorts of sites where you can post your resume online, scan electronic help-wanted ads or research companies via their Web sites.

    But recruiting by Internet is by no means perfect, says Christye Robley, a recruiter at Shalimar-based Tybrin Corp., an ever-growing defense contractor that is constantly looking to hire computer scientists, software engineers and system administrators.

    "I've been real disappointed with the results from using online databases," she says.

    In this age of full employment, there's just too much competition for qualified candidates, Robley says. Those whose resumes stand out are usually overwhelmed by callbacks.

    "If I find a resume out there I like and try to contact the person - if I call him or send him an e-mail - most likely he has already been approached by many other recruiters from all over the country," she says. "I had one guy tell me he kept track and in like two days he'd had over 75 people contact him."

    Robley also gets discouraged by the number of resumes that are posted by people who already are working and aren't really interested in changing jobs but just want to test the waters. By the time she realizes they aren't serious, she's invested quite a lot of time in them, she says.

    Robley has had better luck with the Internet when she posts jobs-available ads, and candidates respond. But she says that when it comes to getting the word out about job openings, she'd never put all her eggs in one basket.

    "We do a lot of advertising," she explains, "a mix of Internet advertising, newspaper advertising, referrals and headhunters."

    Glenn Gutmacher agrees that the Internet can be a good tool for finding, or filling, a job. But it has its limitations, warns Gutmacher, who works for TownOnline, an interactive publication in Needham, Mass.

    For one, Gutmacher says, online give-and-take usually only works for certain professions, like finance, the technical fields, human resources, health care and marketing.

    He says online classifieds aren't as effective as their newspaper counterparts in reaching blue-collar workers, folks in the hospitality business and other people who have no intention of moving halfway across the country to go to work.

    Still, Gutmacher says, for firms that recruit nationally, or even internationally, the Internet is unparalleled in its ability to match qualified candidates with would-be employers.

    From an employer standpoint, there are certain advantages to advertising on the Net instead of in trade publications.

    "In traditional media, like newspapers, you try to make ads as short as possible, which means you can't put in a whole lot of detail," Gutmacher points out. "On the Internet, there's no extra charge based on length. You can write detailed ads which allows candidates to see all the qualifications that are needed, so they can see if some of the skills are beyond them and maybe they shouldn't apply."

    Some employers choose to post company profiles that can help their firms get good exposure. Such sites do everything from explain what kind of products a business makes and sells to what the corporate culture is, Gutmacher says.

    Most of the time they include e-mail addresses that interested candidates can respond to. As far as Gutmacher is concerned, e-mail is an underused resource.

    "You should realize e-mail is the most used part of the Internet," he says. "It's very easy to find people's e-mail addresses. Don't be shy about sending them a message, 'Could you recommend companies I should be applying to, or trade shows I should be attending?' It doesn't cost even a stamp to communicate by e-mail and you'll usually get very good feedback and develop very good career networks that way."

    From the job seeker's view, the No. 1 benefit of advertising on the Net is that it's free. Very few online recruiting firms charge for resume postings; they make their money from participating employers.

    Along with the resume postings, Gutmacher recommends tapping into another computer resource: newsgroups, which he describes as "collections of messages organized by very specific topics."

    "Among the 30,000 newsgroups out there, about 200 are recruitment-specific," he says. "You can look up Jobs in Florida, for instance. The way it works, you go to a search engine specifically for those news groups, like www.dejanews.com, and find a topic you are interested in. If you put in accounting, for example, it will pull up the different newsgroups related to accounting."

  • Business Editor Tracy Conner can be reached at 863-1111, Ext. 439, or tracyc@nwfdailynews.com

    NOTES

  • This article can be found on page F1 of the February 14, 1999 Daily News.