Job hunters find listings, advice via the Web

Since you can get anything you want on the Internet, it goes without saying that job seekers turn to the thousands of online employment sites — both those included in individual companies’ Web sites and the clearinghouse sites like the Colorado Job Search Page (www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Trails/4790).

The granddaddy of the online employment sites, National Career Search’s CareerMagazine (www.careermag.com), was started in Boulder in 1994, long before the World Wide Web was a household term.

What differentiates CareerMagazine from the others is content, says President Gary Resnikoff.

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“We came out of the recruiting industry, and we know that a job lead isn’t a job. People need advice. We have writers from all over the country publish articles from how to write a resume to how to interview and negotiate a salary.”

Although he doesn’t have statistics on how many job-seekers have found employment through CareerMagazine, Resnikoff believes the site works because some of his largest clients, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Novell have been using it for three years.

Hewlett-Packard, which has 1,000 listings, keeps records comparing different methods of recruitment. According to Resnikoff, the company concluded that CareerMagazine was the lowest cost per hire.

Big corporate clients pay $9,000 a year for unlimited listings, while smaller employers with one opening pay $95 for 30 days. “It’s less than the newspaper, and since we don’t charge by the word, it allows them to tell more of their story,” Resnikoff says. More words means better searching capabilities for candidates. “We advise employers to put in all the buzzwords to make sure the job is viewed by the right people,” he says.

To augment the job search process, NCS just launched SearchLink, a point-to-point videoconferencing service that allows employers to interview candidates remotely.

Employers who want to use the service need to install ISDN phone service and a high-end PC with special hardware and software and a camera at their site.

Candidates then go to NCS’s videoconferencing studios, usually located in executive suite conference rooms, a long-distance call is made, and an interview conducted. At 26 to 28 frames per second, the video is near-television quality (30 frames per second), and the audio is full-duplex, meaning there’s no cut-off when one party interrupts the other.

The complete system costs the employer about $10,000, plus $250 per interview, according to Resnikoff.

At $500 to $1,000 for airfare, hotel, meals and staff time, how much companies save on recruitment costs will depend on how much they use the system, Resnikoff says.

But it’s not just a money issue, he says.

“We’re in a candidates’ market. So if a candidate is hot, four or five companies may be trying to get them in and the person can’t take that much time off from work. A lot of time you lose the candidate because you can’t get close to them quickly enough.”

NCS currently has 30 studio locations, and expects to have 80 by the summer, and 300 by the end of 1999. Dell signed on as one of the first SearchLink customers, and Resnikoff expects that at the rate it’s hiring, the computer giant will conduct 2000 to 3000 remote interviews in 1998.