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Recent debates about internet growth are driving last year's wild fantasies of 1 Billion users by the turn of the century to a more reasonable annual doubling. What that means for recruiting sites is that it will remain important, for the foreseeable future, to remember that half of the potential audience has less than a year's experience on the Net. With average usage at 6 hours per month, the typical user will have about 30 hours of experience when they first visit your site.

While the hype is focused on advanced features and complex technical innovation, users are struggling with the twin difficulties of an Internet Learning Curve and predictable career anxiety. Absolutely anything that your site can do to ease one, the other or both of these struggles will make loyal audience members quickly.

Finding the middle ground in information design is not a simple task , however. vices, features and job listings can conspire to make friendly jobsites into a nightmare of conflicting options and opportunities. We strongly urge you to consider usability as one of the proimary design features of your site. If you reduce a candidate's decision making and gently guide them through your maze, you will make their job hunt more effective and increase your referral rates.

CareerPath is still busily claiming to be " the premier location on the World Wide Web for recruitment advertising". With nearly 50,000 job ads this week, they can certanly claim to have a lot of jobs. But, six months after the launch, the site still lacks the basic tools of a recruiting site. The good news is that large, well heeled efforts like this one are virtually bound to end up "in committee". The bad news...if they ever figure out how to harness their clout, watch out.

The features based competition is intensifying. As the various players add features to their websites, they raise the competitive bar for everyone else. It seems like a good time to review the basic competitive features required for market entry:

• A Database of Job Listings. In general terms, it takes about 1,000 to 1,500 to reach critical mass, making your site an interesting destination for job hunters. In very specialized areas, the threshold is somewhat lower.

• A Resume Database. Again, 1,000 seems to be a magic threshold with specialties weighing in at a bit smaller. The verifiable contents of your database make the site interesting to recruiters and employers.

• A Matching Service. The standard is rapidly becoming matching for both employers and candidates. A matching service can notify or post to an account. Email notification seems to generate a more loyal following.

• Online Data Entry. Candidates and Clients both need simple methods to list their requirements or resumes on your service. The clarity of the accompanying instructions is becoming a competitive discriminator

• Free HTML Resumes. Many services offer tools for the creation and storage of HTML Resumes for each candate.

• Bulk Resume Distribution. Several services now provide the ability to deliver targeted email directly to the recruiting offices of comanies using the net to recruit.

• Spider Databases. There is a rapidly growing trend to develop a database that includes many jobs posted from around the net. Precursor services included indexed access to USENET Job Postings

• Candidate Advice. Traffic is becoming increasingly dependent on the educational content of a site. From Resume and Interview tips to Career management tactics, the online employment site must serve very broad needs for candidates in order to retain them as readers.

• Traffic. The competitive threshold seems to be around 100,000 hits per day (somewhere between 7,000 and 15,000 visitors.

• Inbound Links. The largest players have nearly 10,000 inbound links. We consider 1,500 a bare minimum.

• External (Outbound) Links. As employers become more savvy, they want to integrate their employment site with the online advertising that they purchase. Allowing and Encouraging Outbound links is critical to this strategy.

• Measured Performance. All customers are concerned about the odds that their time will be used effectively. Traffic, Demographic and Database size and currency statistics are critical in this regard.

• Client Advice. For the foreseeable future, the number of clients who are first-timers will be a large proportion of all revenue streams. Sites that acknowledge this and make it easy for new users win the competition

• Information Design. With all of the competing features, the design architecture of an Employment Website is becoming a major competitive discriminator. Simply providing all of the features is not enough. The site must facilitate the use of the features.

Infochecks and Thomas Investigative Publications (TIP) both offer extensive databased searches of background information. (TIP) is a part of the Private Investigator's Mall, a collection of about 25 PI firms across the country.

As our ability to perform increasingly complete background searches continues to keep pace with the technology, expect to see ever louder privacy concerns expressed.

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

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

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