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1998 Recruiting Trends

Here's a quick look at the overall trends affecting recruiting in 1998, online and off. To stay abreast of the changes, read the Electronic Recruiting News, our free online daily newsletter.

1. Advertising Distribution

Picking up on a trend pioneered by Net-Temps, many major employment advertising services began distributing their content. The result for Recruiters: an ad placed on one service is placed on a number of others. Favorite destinations for postings? Yahoo!, Classifieds 2000, niche webzines, Usenet Newsgroups. Downsides: Results are harder to measure, classified advertising inventories are bulging, brand name distinctions are getting lost.

2. Just In Time Recruiting (JITR)

Recognizing that labor shortages are generational, visionary companies have begun developing long term relationships with pools of candidates. A blend of requirements planning and value based network development are at the core of JITR. The idea is to have candidates available when you need them. The underlying theory is that labor supply can be managed like any other production ingredient. Approaches range from Intel's relationship with San Jose State to Microsoft's relationship with its developer community.

3. Resume Spidering

With millions of resumes floating around the web chased by tens of thousands of recruiters, speed has become a critical issue. Services like ITTA's Resume Robot are pioneering the field. These automated agents find resumes as they hit the web and deliver preplanned messages from recruiting professionals. Expect an explosion of spidering services in 1998.

4. Online Training

The available labor pool is under trained. Whose problem is it? Manpower clearly sees the opportunity to use training as a method of achieving JITR. By offering a rapidly growing suite of free training courses, Manpower gets to the core of developing a skilled labor pool. They're generally willing to bear the cost of training in order to know the moment that a candidate reaches a new skill level. You might think of it as sound inventory management.

5. Inverse Distribution

Often referred to as "do nothing recruiting", companies like Junglee are automating the job posting process in an interesting way. The idea is simple. A Junglee spider grabs the job postings from your site and in your format. It reformats the material and delivers it to one or another job listing service. Major customers to date have been Newspapers. The service is so sensitive to customer needs that it will become a standard offering in 1998. Expect small competitors like CareerCast to drive pricing to a comodity level.

6. The Shakeout Begins

Although we've been unable to confirm the rumors, the street is alive with the notion that Intellimatch has closed its doors. No humans seem to answer phones there. More than a few large providers of employment advertising services are under extreme financial pressure. Years of missing paychecks and brutal staff turnover combined with extreme price pressures are forcing many to rethink their plans. Carefully judge your supplier's stability.

7. Common Sense Arrives In Small Nuggets

The math of online employment advertising includes instantly diminishing returns. Each additional ad in a database decreases the availability of all other ads. Bigness, the usual sales pitch, is a red herring. It is better, all other things equal, to be one of ten ads than to be one of ten thousand.

8. The Re-Emergence of The Newspapers

Slow out of the chute and deeply burdened with internal politics, some newspapers finally arrived with useful employment advertising. Our list of notables includes:

The Wall Street Journal for innovative content improvement

The Washington Post for redefining the role of the newspaper in local economies

Career Path for launching the largest advertising campaign in the industry to date

Philadelphia Online for innovative broadcast fax integration

San Jose Mercury News for planned integration with its email channel

9. The Emergence Of Professional Internet Recruiters

The skills required to harness the research power of the Web are complex and constantly changing. The earliest attempts at integrating the Web into recruiting departments featured the identification of a "researcher". These professionals, generally young and ambitious, often found themselves boxed into no-win assignments. Performance criteria have been difficult to establish. Success, though hard to measure, generally results in more work (additional punishment). More mature organizations are building internet skills into the entire workforce utilizing the experience gained by researchers.

10. The Rise In The Importance Of Marketing

Each Job Posting competes with (at last count) over 150,000,000 other web pages. And, job postings generally only reach active job hunters. To distinguish themselves among other recruiters, visionary companies are using proactive outreach to build individual relationships with passive job hunters. Take a long hard look at Matrix Resources. Their approach features building a content "vault" that is consistently useful for potential candidates and customers alike.

11. Regional and Professional Nicheing (Vertical Integration)

InfoworksUSA, The Atlanta Computer Jobs Store and The Chicago Software Newspaper all share a common market perception. They see the web as a regional thing. It's regional geographically and regional by profession. Attempts to reach broad global audiences are gently giving way to smart targeting of small groups. Watch these pioneers. Their futures, while closely tied to regional variations, are directly coupled with the Web's strengths. We're equally impressed with the Career Mosaic moves into vertical markets

12. The Dawning Of Internet Video

Although predictable, Career Magazine has solidly pointed to the future of recruiting. Video interviews, using the web as a transport vehicle, have become affordable. As desktop video and internet telephony expand their reach in 1998, we'll see lots of imitators. Video will be rapidly integrated with products like Microsoft's Net Meeting during 1998.

13. Windows Of Opportunity

It became clear in 1997 that the Recruiting Marketplace involves a series of progressive windows of opportunity. Generally, they seem to last about 18 months from beginning to end. Each "window" generously rewards the early pioneers and virtually penalizes the latecomers. In distribution, for example, early Net-Temps clients were the big winners. Their ads received disproportionate exposure in the early days of the window.. As other services made distribution a commodity, the net gain experienced by the early adopters began to decline. Current Windows include Spidering and Inverse Distribution.

14. The Changing Value Of The Candidate

Candidates are scarce. Where they could be treated as a commodity five years ago, candidates hold the upper hand in the hiring equation today. The only slightly good news is that consumer confidence is at a 30 year high. This means that passive candidates are somewhat more likely to feel comfortable about changing jobs. In the short term, "poaching" will become a way of life, inside and outside of the HR department. The longer term impact will be a rearrangement of the traditional employee-employer contract. Meanwhile, IT salaries are soaring.

15. The Emergence of Resume Broadcasting

1st Steps In The Job Hunt
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