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We've also added a whopping 79 new search firms and companies offering employment opportunities to our collection of New Sites. The industry seems to have an inexhaustible supply of new entrants.

From a job seeker's perspective, recruiting-links.com offers a forms based interface to a database of some kind and depth (it's never really specified). The job hunter can choose geographic region, industry and profession as search parameters. recruiting-links.com returns a list of URLs and email addresses.....maybe.

From an advertiser's perspective, there's a great deal of breathy hype about discounts, improved advertising effectiveness and charter discounts. Exactly what the service is remains unclear though the rhetoric is intense.

We think that recruiting-links.com sells recruiters the ability to list the employment opportunities they have elsewhere in a database that jobhunters can search.

If that's the product, it's an important part of a good idea. The Web needs an advertiser subsidized index of posted job opportunities. But (and maybe we should have had more coffee first), it's awfully difficult to tell what the service actually is.

Job hunters need ways to minimize their choices when looking for opportunities. Advertisers need methods to increase the distribution (hit counts) of ads placed around the Web. So, a service that points to your ad on, say, Career Mosaic is a sound idea. It's the same basic notion as advertising in a variety of newspapers.

recruiting-links.com faces several problems in implementing this approach. To build traffic, they'll need to offer a solid database of jobs and links (even in a search on North American Engineering Jobs In Computing, there were only 39). To build the database, they'll need hard clients. It's the normal Catch-22 of building an employment advertising site on the Web. Though they claim to have made a great innovative leap forward, they end up facing the same "momentum" problem as the rest of the industry.

As a final minor gripe, we continue to wonder why Job Advertising Sites continue to disappoint their customers. It's become routine to create comprehensive forms that have absolutely no chance of being useful. For instance, on recruiting-links.com, it's possible to search for a job in North America in Agriculture doing Media and Communications. We, of course, tried it. As you'd guess, there were no jobs in the category and the form suggested that we broaden our search.

In an age of "on-the-fly" HTML development based on database contents, there is absolutely no excuse for delivering forms that raise and dash expectations so quickly. The tiniest bit of user sensitivity would tell you that it's better not to offer a choice if the answer is always (and we're going to be surprised if this job category is ever offered on the web) going to be "No".

Lest you think that we find recruiting-links.com completely valueless, we don't. Beneath the overstated hype are the rudiments of a solid service. It will, however, take a meaningful investment and solid demographic targeting to make it work. recruiting-links.com desperately needs to figure out what business it's in and who its audience is.

Several key HR managers in "Hollywood" have banded together to form this recruiting consortium. They provide job listings and a central source of information about Entertainment Industry opportunities. With a few flourishes, like additional career information, a standard resume collection system and a solid resource collection, this site could become a model for intra-industry collaborations.

It's interesting that the Entertainment world has developed the first cross-company colloborative recruiting model. The industry is neck and neck with Silicon Valley in progress towards the projectization of work. It's useful to think of both industries as monolithic organizations with project offices. Balancing the workload around the industry is a challenging intra-organizational question with few Western models to follow. Competing firms find themselves in the business of utilizing the same human resources at different times. Optimal staffing solutions reduce overall industry costs while increasing synergy for all of the participants.

Tricky problem.

If you're interested in the future of recruiting and employment practice, we highly reccomend that you bookmark and periodically follow the progress of this group. This cross-company collaboration is coming to an industry near you.

Take a look at our Top 25 Recruiters in this list, you will find the bulk of the major places on which to advertise a given job. You can find a comprehensive list of places that can help you using our Job Hunter's Tools list. It lists agencies, search firms and advertising agencies that will help you fill your position.

Here's how it works. Go to the Rover site; submit a list of URLs; and, return the emailed authorization form. Rover will search the web for email addresses contained on those pages and build a list for you. It can handle up to 10,000 email addresses at a time. It will save you hours and hours of research.

You can use Rover to build a mailing list for candidates with HTML resumes, potential clients or other recruiters.

The team at Rover has worked hard to make sure that their service isn't used as a source of email that abuses net-standards. It meticulously adheres to the Robot Exclusion Standard (the way you tell robots and spiders to leave you alone). So, sites that don't wish to be indexed are safe from its scrutiny. (If you are unfamiliar with robots and spiders, you might want to check out some of the tools on Yahoo's list).

Wide public availability of technology like Rover will have a significant impact on recruiting techniques. Identifying and corresponding with potential candidates and clients will be come increasingly easy. The competition will start to be focused on the value you add to both sides of the equation.

We suggest that you take a close look at Rover and, at the very minimum, make sure that your research staff is aware of the capabilities. When the service turns commercial this summer, there will still be a major cost savings involved.

Given the Wall Street Journal's ability to deliver a constant stream of updated news (24 hour newsroom and updates hourly) and your ability to create a personal edition, we imagine that this new service will be on most recruiter's desktops in the near term.

They bill themselves as the world's first ever offshore back-office/outsourcing company for web work. With Venezuelan salaries running 10% of the comparable US wage, Tropical Jim's is able to offer pretty amazing service guarantees, outrageous prices and performance promises. They do animations, framing, HTML and general site rework.

Smart businessmen that they are, they recognize that you've probably never done offshore outsourcing and are at least somewhat hesitant. So, they've put together a "get-to-know-you" offer. Send them a gif and directions and they'll animate it for you in 24 hours for $50. That's really inexpensive and allows you to dress up your site while getting to know them.

Smart marketing, solid business idea, solid execution, and above all, great taste in websites. Take a look.

interbiznet is now offering single topic reports for the Industry.

The first offerings are:

   The 21st Century Advertising Agency
   Recruitment Branding Part I
   Recruitment Branding Part II - The Mechanics

Email Colleen Gildea for your copy in PDF Format.

View Table of Contents at http://www.interbiznet.com/briefs/.

Order Today. Only $24.95.

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