ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 22, 1996 TAG: 9602220016
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
ON-LINE SITES are one more place to post or find resumes, and the inspiration for new employment counseling companies.
Most of Kathryn Jordan's clients happen to be men, despite the fact that as owner of Employment Counseling Services in Blacksburg she wanted to help women improve their chances in the job market.
She may have found her target market in a tool that has just recently begun drawing the attention of corporate human-resource managers - the Internet.
With the help of Wayne Gonyea, an experienced operator of an on-line career service based in New York state, Jordan last month launched the Women's Center for Employment on the Internet, a worldwide network of computer networks.
Many employers would like to hire qualified women but don't know where to find them, Jordan said. ``Our goal is to give every woman an opportunity to create a presence on the World Wide Web that will enhance her career potential,'' she said last month when she announced her new service.
Jordan's is one of many sites, large and small, for job seekers and job recruiters that have sprung up on the Internet. By the nature of the Internet, and the people who use it, many of the jobs that have been posted are in technical fields. But that is beginning to change.
The on-line job services work in two basic ways: Employers pay to post job vacancies and information about their companies on a web site, and job seekers pay to post their resumes. The web sites sometimes provide articles on job hunting and employment issues. Some services charge fees to sift through the resumes and pass along those that most closely fit a company's needs.
Jordan charges women $59.95 a year to post their resumes on her web site. She also has a place on the site for companies interested in reaching women to list job vacancies.
Barry Lawrence, a spokesman for the 58,000-member Society for Human Resource Management in Alexandria, said the on-line job services are beginning to show up on the ``radar screens'' of human resource managers around the country. ``Like anything else on the Internet, it's relatively new,'' he said.
Human resource managers are talking about the Internet as an option for finding workers, but it hasn't replaced traditional methods such as campus recruiting and classified advertisements, he said.
The Internet is one of many resources that his company uses to find job applicants, said John Kuzma, a staffing director for Motorola Inc.'s Land Mobile Products Sector. ``We use everything,'' he said.
The pool of people using the computer network for job searches will expand over time, but for now it's difficult to find your way around the web, he said. Motorola has found applicants for the technical jobs it has advertised on the web, he said.
Motorola posts jobs and information about the company on CareerWeb, a Norfolk-based, on-line job service owned by Landmark Communications Inc., parent of The Roanoke Times.
The company charges employers $65 a month for posting job openings on its Internet site and $100 a listing for pre-screening job applicants. It offers a variety of other services, including a credential bank, in which resumes are posted for employers to view.
In the future, people will make career changes throughout their lives, and services like hers will help them move to the next opportunity, said Christina Bublick, the job service's general manager.
CareerWeb receives 600,000 visits to its web pages each month, she said. Employers posting jobs on the service include American Airlines, Merrill Lynch, Bally's Park Place Casino and the Virginia Department of Transportation.
One issue that the use of the Internet raises, Lawrence of the human-resource managers group said, relates to the electronic scanning of resumes and culling of job candidates before names are passed on to an employer. The federal agency that polices discrimination against protected classes of job applicants such as the handicapped hasn't agreed yet whether the electronic searches conflict with the agency's reporting requirements, he said.
As the use of computers grows among the populace, the use of the Internet for job searches outside of the technical fields also should grow, Lawrence said. Listings for jobs in finance, banking, sales, manufacturing and consulting are just starting to show up on the Internet, he said.
But for now, if he were looking for a job, he wouldn't change his tactics, he said.
"Networking [the word-of-mouth kind] is still as good as you can get,'' he said.
Job services on the Internet's World Wide Web and their computer addresses:
* Women's Center for Employment - http://amsquare.com/america/wcenter/center.html
* CareerWeb - http://www.cweb.com.
* CareerPath - http://www.careerpath.com/. CareerPath, which lists roughly 40,000 job ads, is a joint effort of six major newspapers: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and The Boston Globe. The newspapers require advertisers to buy print advertisements before loading their ads onto the Internet.
* E-Span - http.//www.espan.com. E-Span, a four-year old service on which about 2,000 mostly North American companies post about 4,000 to 5,000 help-wanted advertisements. A feature of E-Span allows job seekers to enter information about themselves and have it matched with specific job openings.
* Career and Resume Management for the 21st Century - http://www.crm21.com/. It includes a resume bank, help-wanted ads, a list of resume databases worldwide, a job resource centers, and articles on job-hunting
LENGTH: Long : 107 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM/Staff ``Our goal is to give every woman anby CNBopportunity to create a presence on the World Wide Web that will
enhance her career potential,'' Kathryn Jordan said of her web site.
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