Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506300122
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: G-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID BANK KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: SAN JOSE, CALIF. LENGTH: Long
To keep pace with the company's explosive growth, executives made a quick decision to add 100 bright young engineers by July 4. But with the school year winding down, they were about to lose the chance to grab the top talent from this year's crop of college graduates.
Traditional methods for finding suitable job candidates, including combing through books of resumes at college engineering departments and seeking referrals from current employees, would have taken too long. And newspaper advertising doesn't necessarily work in recruiting students.
``We needed to make up yardage fast,'' said Julie Pestka-Schardt, a human resources manager at the San Jose, Calif., computer chip maker.
That's why the company enlisted Bernard Hodes Advertising, its New York recruitment consultant, to create a presence on the Internet's World Wide Web that featured the company's logo set against a flowing American flag. More importantly, the Web pages in the CareerMosaic site (http://www.careermosaic.com/) described in detail the available openings, accompanied by a prompt: ``To apply for this position, click here.'' Every applicant was promised a response within a week.
The electronic recruiting effort has yielded nearly 500 qualified applicants, and the company expects to meet its July 4 deadline.
``They can be sitting in their sweats in the middle of doing homework and decide to see what's available,'' Pestka-Schardt said. ``We present ourselves to them in their medium.''
Recruiters for high-tech companies are leading the job market online. As access to the Internet becomes easier and more widespread, employers in other industries are beginning to follow.
One reason is the sharply lower costs. High-tech companies have traditionally expected to spend anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 to fill an important job successfully.
That kind of money is enough to set up an extensive site on the World Wide Web - the graphical point-and-click feature that is driving the Internet's boom in popularity. Bernard Hodes Advertising charges $10,000 to $20,000 to create and manage a multiple-page Web site for an entire year.``For the price of one time on a Sunday, you can do all of this,'' said Tim Gibbon, an executive vice president at the company's New York headquarters.
A Web site serves the added purpose of enhancing a company's image. Cypress's pages tout the company as ``a semiconductor upstart ... destined for future glories.''And it's a pittance to sprinkle engineering departments with free promotional computer mouse pads printed with the company's Web address.
Employers' rush to the Net is making many newspaper executives nervous. At the Mercury News, for example, employment classified advertising is the single largest source of revenue. For no additional charge, the Mercury News posts advertisers' classifieds on its Web site (http://www.sjmercury.com) but does not sell Internet classified advertising separately from traditional newspaper space.
The growing number of job openings listed on the Internet is a boon to job seekers, who gain the ability to make nationwide searches and sift openings by occupation and location.
That said, it's important to be realistic about the resources that are available. Many of the sites are still under construction and offer more in the way of career advice and resume tips than they do in actual job openings. Others pad the number of job listings they claim by including the thousands of postings in the Internet's Usenet newsgroups, the discussion forums that often include outdated or incorrect listings.
Some of the on-line recruitment services claim to be something more than simply a replacement for newspaper help-wanted listings. By putting the power to search and sift in the hands of every job seeker, they say they are shifting the balance between employer and applicant.
HOW TO FIND WORK VIA COMPUTER
Job listings and resources are scattered widely on the Internet's World Wide Web. Be careful: The quality and freshness of the sites and their listings vary widely.
Various World Wide Web indexes contain links to many of the sites.
The Whole Internet Catalog (http://gnn.com/gnn/wic) has a Careers & Employment link under its Business and Finance section. Other sources of job information are linked through Yahoo at http://www.yahoo.com/Business/Employment.
Some of the major job resource sites can be reached directly:
Interactive Employment Network. Job listings appear to be fresh and up-to-date. http://www.espan.com/
Monster Board. A hip format and colorful graphics make this site popular with students and young people. http://www.monster.com/
CareerWeb. Job postings in the technical, computer and engineering fields. http://www.cweb.com
Career Mosaic. Bernard Hodes Advertising, one of the nation's largest employment recruiting agencies, created this highly publicized job listing site. http://www.careermosaic.com
Newspapers, such as The Virginian Pilot and The Ledger Star (http://www.infi.net/pilot) or the San Jose Mercury News (http://www.sjmercury.com) The sites contain the full classified ad sections, searchable by keywords. The Roanoke Times expects to have its classifieds online later this summer.
Recruiters Online Network. The place that employment recruiters go to share information about the job market. http://www.onramp.net/ron/
by CNB