[ALBSA-Info] If you're looking for jobs

[Kreshnik Bejko]

Despite all the internet hoopla it seems 'having connections' is still 
pretty much the only way to land a job. And we thought we'd escape the 
'miku' curse when we left Albania!

enjoy the article and Happy New Years


January 2, 2002




Online Job Sites Offer Easy Searches,
But Boards Produce Few Actual Hires

By KRIS MAHER and RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


It is hard to get a job in a recessionary environment, no matter what means 
are used. But some job seekers say they are becoming particularly 
disenchanted with big online job sites.

Users say the boards often have out-of-date listings and that inquiries go 
unacknowledged by potential employers. In fact, many users are finding that 
job hunts conducted solely online rarely produce jobs -- a phenomenon made 
worse by the current economic downturn.

Take Grace Dubois. The 37-year-old Connersville, Ind., resident spends 
roughly five hours a day on the Web job hunting through job boards. Over the 
past nine months, the unemployed health-care administrator and nutrition 
consultant has applied for nearly 400 health-care industry jobs online. Yet 
she has landed only seven job interviews and not many responses from other 
potential employers.

"I don't know if they're even getting my resume," Ms. Dubois complains. 
"When they list jobs on the Internet, there's often no phone number or name, 
just an e-mail or a fax [number]. You don't know where your resume is going. 
There's no acknowledgment. The Internet has made a lot of people lazy."

Posted vacancies are often out of date, Ms. Dubois says. She suspects some 
are designed merely to get information about job seekers into the databases 
of outside recruiters. Machines, not humans, often match job openings to 
candidates -- one reason that Ms. Dubois receives numerous e-mails about 
irrelevant openings. "They keep sending me engineering jobs, which I don't 
even ask for," she says.

Her frustration is a far cry from the way Internet job hunts were supposed 
to go. The major online job boards offer hundreds of thousands of 
opportunities, providing job seekers an alternative to searching corporate 
Web sites and local newspaper help-wanted ads. To job hunters, they have 
held out the promise of getting a resume in front of a vast pool of 
potential employers with relative ease.

Enticing Online-Jobs Business Inspires a Bold Hostile-Takeover Bid by Yahoo 
(Dec. 24, 2001)

CareerBuilder Venture to Buy Online Recruiter HeadHunter (Aug. 27, 2001)

But despite the reach and apparent ease online job searches offer, a 
surprisingly small proportion of jobs get filled that way. Only 6% of hires 
for management-level jobs currently occur through any Internet site, 
compared with 61% for networking, according to a recent study by Drake Beam 
Morin, a New York firm that provides outplacement counseling services to big 
companies and advises job seekers on a variety of methods including the job 
boards.

Another study indicates most successful job-search contacts made online in 
2001 happened directly at corporate Web sites, not through job boards. At 
nine big public companies, which combined made more than 62,000 hires last 
year, 16% of total hires were initiated at the corporate Web site, according 
to the study, conducted by CareerXroads, a consulting company in Kendall 
Park, N.J., that publishes an annual guide to job boards and consults with 
companies on their Web sites. The percentage of hires made through the four 
biggest job boards, Monster.com (www.monster.com), Hotjobs.com 
(www.hotjobs.com), CareerBuilder (www.careerbuilder.com) and HeadHunter.net 
(www.headhunter.net), was far smaller -- 1.4%, 0.39%, 0.29% and 0.27%, 
respectively.

Job seekers should use the Internet to collect information, says Mark 
Mehler, a CareerXroads principal. But he cautions them against overreliance 
on the Internet. People should remember "that in the majority of 
corporations in America, employee referrals are the No. 1 source of how 
people get hired," he says.

Dimitri Boylan, president and chief executive of Hotjobs.com, says it's not 
the job boards' fault if some resumes attract few responses. "In terms of 
not getting a reply to a job, that's primarily the company's option," he 
says, adding, "Right now, they are getting a lot of applicants." Hotjobs.com 
Ltd. has agreed to be acquired by Yahoo Inc. Mr. Boylan acknowledges the 
chance that overloaded hiring managers will lose track of applicants. 
However, "it's less so with an online system than it is with a box full of 
resumes," he says.


Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com and a global director at the job board's 
parent, TMP Worldwide Inc., acknowledges imperfections in database search 
tools. "I've said that I'll go to my grave trying to improve database 
searching and tools," he says, adding, "I feel pretty good about the way the 
system matches up skills with openings and will continue to improve it." 
Barry Lawrence, a spokesman for CareerBuilder Inc., which recently acquired 
Headhunter.net, similarly defended the company's sites. Job seekers are 
"just not as patient as they used to be," he says, citing the current 
weakened job market.

"All job boards can do is bring you to the company's front door," says Tony 
Lee, general manager of CareerJournal.com (www.careerjournal.com), the 
executive career site of The Wall Street Journal. Savvy employers, he adds, 
use automated response systems, so job seekers know their resume has been 
received. Currently, the biggest complaint among job seekers using 
CareerJournal is that there aren't enough listings: There are now roughly 
23,000 jobs on the site, compared with about 35,000 a year ago, a result of 
the economic slowdown, Mr. Lee says.

In addition to the giant job boards, there are niche sites catering to 
professions ranging from accounting to weed science. But as the number of 
job boards has skyrocketed, so has competition among applicants using them 
-- especially since the unemployment rate began to rise last year.

As a result, the frustrations of searching for a job in a slow economy 
happen at warp speed. "We've never gone through a recession with e-mail and 
with the Internet," says Cary Smith, director of marketing technology for 
Cigna Corp., an employee-benefits provider based in Philadelphia. "It has 
become very easy to create a resume and then transmit it effortlessly and 
instantaneously to whomever you want to send it to."

Indeed, the ease with which candidates can create and send out resumes 
online has meant that employers trying to fill a post can expect to be 
deluged. Daniel Parrillo, president of Strategi, a small Stockton, Calif., 
technology-recruiting firm, recently posted an opening for an engineering 
vice president on five job boards at 4 p.m. By the time he arrived at work 
the next morning, he had 321 electronic resumes from people whose experience 
ranged from chief operating officer to help-desk troubleshooter. Several 
days later, he still hadn't even opened 71 of the responses.

"I probably do have one diamond in the rough in those 71 e-mails I still 
have to get to," Mr. Parillo says. "But unfortunately, if I do find this 
person, they're going to get into the process too late." He estimates he'll 
eventually respond to about 80% of the applicants, in most cases sending a 
"canned e-mail" note.

Write to Kris Maher at kris.maher at wsj.com and Rachel Emma Silverman at 
rachel.silverman at wsj.com


_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com