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Submit-O-Matic

• Commerce 2000
• E-Span
• Intellimatch
• Job Explorer
• Resumes Direct
• Online Career Center
• Recruiters OnLine Network

There are at least 30 links to other database sites.

Submit-O-Matic is a very clever introduction to a larger service called "The Job Detective". Essentially, the company has positioned itself as a sort of human agent for job hunters. Given the overwhelming complexity of an Internet based job hunt, the idea resonates for us. As a job hunter, you'd tell the company what you're looking for. They then can:

• Post Your Resume in Hundreds of Places
• Research Companies and Recruiters For Relevant Job Postings
• Collect and Sort The Various Electronic Responses You Get (Email and Fax)

Infoworks USA

The Team at Infoworks is organized by region. Beneath their web interface lies a human strategy to plumb the differences between regions in the United States. This strategy deserves your clear attention. While the site occupies space on the so-called "World-Wide-Web", the company recognizes the key truth about Recruiting. The bulk of the work in our business is inherently regional. The development of results for your recruiting requirements is handled with a clear emphasis on available candidates in your region.

Building regional focus directly into their organization clearly discriminates InfoworksUSA from the competition.

You might take a quick look at their "help" page. Most services assume that candidates will readily understand search logic. InfoworksUSA has gone to great lengths to provide an easy to use facility.

As the marketplace continues to devolve into discrete niches, keep your eyes on players like these guys. They don't wave their arms claiming "global dominance". Rather, they provide focused services with a clear marketing path to the candidates you need.

Everyone knows just how competitive the IT/IS Recruiting marketplace has become. Given the InfoworksUSA marketing strategy and sleek operations, they're liable to be a useful weapon in your advertising arsenal.

A Short Visit To Clue Street

You'd imagine any company serious about entering this marketplace would have at least cleaned up their web offering before paying the big bucks to get an article in the Journal. You'd be tempted to think that they'd want some attention on the web. We're guessing that their well placed PR firm doesn't use the web at all.

So, here's their "plan":

• Create an electronic database
• Match Applicants with vacancies
• Have humans screen the results
• Videotape the interviews
• Download the results to clients

From our perspective, it sounds more like the web on Geritol.

We did notice that, given its clout in the industry, Korn-Ferry has done us all a favor. If you want to see how not to do it, look at their site. Complete with a lame vision statement, the site is a monument to "doesn't have a clue-hood". It's proof that name brand doesn't exempt you from the prime rule of site development: The first one is always a disaster. All that was missing were the cute pictures of the CEO and his dog.

We're still hoping to see real meat from one of the big six. We've been astonished as we've watched them piddle their web demographic advantage away. We know it's hard to wake up from the soporific sleep of large retainers, but the market has been changing fast. Hopefully, we'll see something interesting soon.

The only bright spot we see for Korn Ferry comes from an old marketing adage. "It's better to have a great sales force pitching a crummy product than a crummy sales force pitching a great one". We're not sure that the staff at Korn-Ferry wants to see their jobs expanded to include advertising sales. But, we can imagine a number of HR managers who might bite, given the prestige of Korn Ferry's name.

We'd suggest a slightly longer walk down Clue Street.

Little Miss Muffet

Imagine, for example, that you are trying to recruit from within the ranks of Silicon Graphics, Inc. The SGI website contains over 18,000 visible pages (and several thousand others). Just downloading and reading them would take you six months of work.

The web, in its current incarnations appears to be a slide show. You read one page at a time and hope that you will stumble on to the right nexus. We simply can't imagine that this primitive approach will endure as the web grows to billions of pages. No one will be able to find anything.

This is where spidering comes to the rescue.

Rather than jump headfirst into a site, we think you'll be mapping the site in advance of your first visit. There are several commercial spiders available that will accomplish this task for you.

With a spider, you simply enter the address of the site you wish to explore. Then, you walk away from your machine for a while (hours, usually). The spider will go through each of the individual pages on the site and make a map of them. In many cases, spiders will also help you understand the hyperlink relationships between pages.

Some of our current favorites in this area are:

• WebTurbo which is a browser plug in. It maps out the links in the next page you want to explore. Free, the software pays for itself by placing ads in a small window.
• Flash Site, a fully featured spider that will deeply analyze sites of your choosing. About $40. Download a demo
• Black Widow is similar to Flash Site but operates slightly less smoothly. Download a demo.
• Web Snake, a spider that performs some site mapping and some email extraction functions. It's a little harder to control than some of the others, so expect to invest learning curve time. About $30. Download a demo.

Candidate Pools!

According to The Oil Daily:

" Better days also are prompting human resources executives to relearn a long- unused skill: recruiting and hiring. From petroleum engineers and geologists for the new high-tech exploration and operations centers down to roughnecks on rig floors, jobs are going begging.
Companies also are finding very quickly that filling the thousands of available positions is going to be very expensive. And salaries alone won't account for all the costs."

In fact, at the recent Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) annual technical conference, several major companies, as well as manufacturers and contractors were openly recruiting competitors' employees right on the exhibit floor.

Some of the industry's more innovative recruiters are developing rather interesting recruiting plans, including:

• recalling some early retirees and training specialists from other disciplines such as environmental services;
• training non-violent prison inmates to work on rigs;
• recognizing that employees want job satisfaction in addition to a paycheck;
• a closer look at English majors who are considered "thinkers", rather than "doers" to help develop leadership;
• a personnel locator page from Oil Online where ostensible "friends" can look for colleagues and co-workers.

Clearly, this has implications across the recruiting industry. The expectation that recruits will knock on your door is long past. The concept that anyone, especially those with technical and scientific skills, is desperate for a job is gone. New techniques need to be adopted.

While the idea of recruiting from the incarcerated population seems a bit drastic, the novelty of the idea works. The more novel, the better. Because if you don't think of it, someone else will.