How Do You Spell "Duh"?: If arrogance was a reliable sales pitch, the all new Virtual Job Fair would be a fast growing service. Their online literature harshly criticizes marketing professionals and headhunters. Meanwhile, a close evaluation of their approach leads us to think that they could have used a bit of help from the folks they criticize.

BridgePath: We keep resumes posted around the web in order to keep abreast of the latest schemes. Bridgepath is an interesting new twist. The company spiders the web collecting email addresses of recent grads. You can ship targeted email to their database of potential recruits. At $2.50 to $5.00 per name, it seems pricey. But, no one else in currently in this particular niche.

The Niche Is The Thing: We believe that the future of recruiting is in micro-niches. The National PR Network offers recruitment advertising and a resume database refined to Marketing and Public Relations professionals.

Slow

Obviously, there's a "traffic jam" somewhere - but where? And is there anything you can do about it?

The route data takes over the Internet from the site you are accessing to your PC can be likened to water. It follows the path of least resistance. But pinpointing the source of a data blockage in the myriad of routes the data could take seems almost impossible.

No more. NetMedic from Vital Signs does exactly that. The NetMedic "dashboard" includes a pane which displays your personal path from your PC to your modem or Intranet, to your ISP and the Intranet, all the way to the Web site you have requested. When the Web site responds, you see the Web pages as they return to your PC.

Specific sources of performance problems are highlighted in yellow or red.

Net.Medic tells you how well your ISP is performing: call completions, average call connection rates, service failures which prevent accessing Web sites, total connection time, and data sent and received. Now you can check if you should subscribe to a premium service or switch to a different ISP.

The Vital Signs site is attractive and easy to navigate. There are a series of preview screens which seem to give a good indication of how the product performs.

NetMedic costs a shade under $40. You can testdrive for thirty days, but only of you are on a Windows 95/NT platform. Medium = Message

Being geeks at heart, we immediately clicked the View Document Source> command in our browser to see how they did it. The script is very straightforward.

Out of the corner of our eye, however, we noticed that source for the Skillscape page included some odd words: Intellimatch, CareerPath.com, CareerPath, CareerMosaic, Technology Registry, PeopleBank and so on for hundreds of lines.

Frankly, we don't spend a lot of time looking at source code. But, this particular approach (listing lots of your competitors in order to fare better in Search Engines) struck us as particularly odd.

Far too many recruiting companies approach marketing on the web with the same theme as the Skillscape team. "If we just get the formula right, we'll have a hit." Unfortunately, the web (as well as most other things) favors smart, consistent hard work. Building traffic is just not as simple as getting the formula right. It takes lots of legwork and networking.

With some reluctance, we looked further into Skillscape. The site promises an approach that is far better executed by Intellimatch. Just to give you a feel for how complicated they've managed to make a simple idea, we suggest that you look at their descriptive graphic. It paints a picture of a structured development process that is impossible to manage. Key players have no function, everybody else works on everything, and, four database analysts are required to keep the system running.

Somehow, we doubt that this website is going to build much business for Skillscape.

There are a couple of object lessons here:

• Never use a gimmick that exposes your marketing strategy;
• Always have an objective observer review your material before you put it out for public consumption; and,
• Keep your website as simple as possible. Complexity leads to reviews that cover everything but your real business.

To say that the site is content-rich is to understate the wealth of material. Key areas include:

• Regular feature articles that address workplace issues, ethics and career management;
• Bark and Whinge, a weekly poll of job hunters/employees;
• Acid Tests in which interesting people describe their dream jobs;
• The Job Doctor, an advice column; and
• Lots of ads for work in Australia.

It's also interesting to see the difficult balance that periodicals must strike. While revenue comes from employers, readership is composed of employees. Remaining faithful to financial interests while offering relevant content to job hunters and employees is a "dance" that Job Stuff takes to the edge. The Job Doctor columns, in particular, show how carefully a periodical must tread the line. They tackle serious ethics and adjustment issues with grace.

The site itself is remarkably well organized and easy to navigate. When we think about usability, our "dream site" is like an orange that peels itself while you wait. Job Stuff is very close to perfect in this regard.

Why People Leave

The Markle Foundation which is dedicated to "Promoting lifelong learning and an informed citizenry through innovative uses of media and communications technologies" has sponsored a couple of studies that shed some light on the subject.

Internett Dropouts: The Invisible Group is a follow up to Motivations For and Barriers To Internet Usage: Results of a National Public Opinion Survey . Both studies look closely at the issues surrounding long term usage.

It seems that people who teach themselves to use the Net are far more likely to last as users than people who have been assigned to use the tools. Initial motivation determines whether or not a user lasts over time.

Additionally, "lost my account" is a major reason for dropping out of the Internet population. When people change jobs or leave school, their net usage changes. This is very important to understand. When you find a candidate using the net, time is of the essence. If they are in the entry level, there is a meaningful chance that they will lose their account upon college graduation.

Finally, usability matters. The three major reasons that users left the net were:

• Lost access: this was the most frequently stated reason, offered in 36 percent of cases.
• Not sufficiently interesting: 23 percent. Responses included "no time", "lost interest", "boring" or "only a trial".
• Problems with use, cited in 18 percent of the cases . Responses here included "equipment problems", "too hard" or "annoyed by strangers".

Advanced Internet Recruiting Seminars

Click here to learn more about the seminars and register online. Class size is limited to 30 per seminar. The seminars run from 9:00AM to 4:30PM. Take a look at a list of companies who have been to the seminars.

See a detailed index of our past issues

	Week Ending June 29, 1997 Email Etiquette Workforce Changes Employment Projections Hits and Stats Overload
Week Ending June 22, 1997 Net Growth Good PR Who's Recruiting? Net Demographics PEOs Online	Week Ending June 15, 1997 References Right Coast Careers Newspaper Mania Aleph Cover Your Assets
Week Ending June 08, 1997 Not Just Resumes Hodes More Junk Mail Survey Sez Ad Service	Week Ending June 01, 1997 Bad Design, Bad Timing The Last War Mail Security Gimmicks Fed Stats
Week Ending May 25, 1997 Blueness What Works Job Smart Consolidation Marketing Your Site	Week Ending May 18, 1997 Searchbase Email Job Smart Specialty Recruiting What's an Ad?
More Archives The past 21 months of the Electronic Recruiting News	More Archives

"Recruiter's Resolutions For 2003:

1. Finally, clear the resumes off my desk
2. Take a speed-reading course to get through resumes faster
3. Find three new places to source good people
4. Lower cost-per -hire (make that, determine cost-per-hire...then lower it!)
5. Find a talent Management system to help with all of the above.

We know what you're up against. And we've got the answer.

Hodes iQ, brought to you by Bernard Hodes Group. From adopting our talent management system or enhancing your own system to providing new sourcing strategies on the web, we have proven solutions to make your recruiting enterprise better. Find out how Hodes iQ and Hodes iQPost can help you in the new year and beyond.

Put Hodes iQ to the test.

Call 888.438.9911 or visit http://www.hodesiq.com today.

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