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If you've been following the industry for any length of time, you might have the sense that these players have hit some sort of plateau. It's not surprising.

For the most part, the action today is in partnership and alliance development. (We predicted this development in the 1997 Electronic Recruiting Index.) Talk of deals, changes in ownership, and, the financial structure of the industry have taken precedence over service delivery or features improvements.

Each one of these services is led by an honest to goodness dirt under the fingernails visionary entrepreneur. In the early days, payroll was a question of timing and loyalty. There is a lot of personal sacrifice represented in this class.

The playing field is hardly fixed in place. Hot Jobs, Excite, Headhunter, careers.wsj.com, CareerSite and CareerCast have leveraged determination and persistence into thriving enterprises. They are relative newcomers making sense of a chaotic market.

This year's Master Site Winners are:

We offer another look at these services in our Customer Satisfaction Awards (requires Adobe Acrobat). A complete listing of our customer satisfaction measurements is available in the Executive Summary for the 1999 Electronic Recruiting Index (1999ERI). Besides rankings, the 1999ERI offers quantitative measures (including distribution curves) of the performance of 50 key web recruiting operations.

Top Sites: New Models and IT Specific Sites

The dichotomy is covered in today's segment of the 1999 Top 100. We are simultaneously recognizing excellence in the development of New Models and the places where specific IT recruiting really works. There's some significant overlap between the two groups on the level of innovation.

If you saw our Customer Satisfaction awards last week, you might remember that the Computer Jobs Store came out at the top of the heap. Combine that with a strategy that reaches into individual regional markets and you have a sure winner. They are the best in class this year.

On the "New Models" side of the equation, the Wall Street Journal's partnership with Korn-Ferry represents an historical milestone on the business. They are the clear benchmark for innovation in a broad segment of the industry and have made many innovations possible for other players. In this way, careers.wsj.com is setting the pace for the core evolution of the business.

The accomplishments, trends and positions of the other entrants are covered in detail in the 1999 Electronic Recruiting Index. We're particularly excited about our quantitative evaluations of over 50 Job Boards. The Industry out briefings, scheduled for the second full week of October, are turning out to be exciting gatherings of the key players. Ordering information for either or both is on the last page of the Executive Summary.

Top Sites: Regional and Resellers

We believe that the long term future of web Recruiting has an intense regional flavor. After all, very few people are interested in the whole pile of national jobs. They'd rather find something close to home. This year's top sites in the Regional and Reseller categories are:

The Resellers each offer a different approach to the problem. We love the idea behind HRSites International (targeting and demographics). IIRC offers an integrated network of independent job boards. We gave the Best in class award to Best Internet Recruiter because their automation is so seamless. They've focused on simplification and done a stellar job of it.

Regional sites have regional flavor. We've raved about Craig's List (now called the "List Foundation") and Smart Dog in the past. You can't imagine two more different approaches.

Smart Dog is a hip, regional, irreverent marketing campaign by the businesses in Rochester, NY. It's job is to sell Rochester to digital employees who are looking to leave the rat race behind.

Craig's List (the List Foundation), offers community, networking and job assistance within the San Francisco Multimedia community. While Smart Dog is a hip advertising campaign, Craig's List is simply a hip organization. The folks at the List Foundation are really community organizers. Several smart Bay area recruiters participate regularly.

The other regional winners (most notably the Silicon Alley Reporter's daily emailer), weave interesting webs of local content into their Recruitment Advertising play. Reaching passive candidates in a local market is best done through regional sites or professional niches.

We will be doing a series of industry out briefings in Mid October. These day long sessions will review the findings, results and forecasts from our just completed research, the 1999 Electronic Recruiting Index. Ordering information is only available on the last page of the executive summary. The one day sessions will be held in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

Top Sites: The Big Companies And 3rd Party Firms

Today, we are announcing the winners in two categories: Corporate and 3rd Party Recruiters.

A quick review of the sites will tell you that we are no longer fooled by slick graphics. The essence of sound web recruiting has more to do with value delivered directly to the job hunter than anything else. From salary surveys to comprehensive introductions to company culture; from free training to immense resources for professional niches, these sites all focus on delivering consistent value, over time, to the people who visit the site. They build return visits from logical target candidates.

Nobody is more effective in the use of the web as a recruiting tool than Microsoft. Their Skills2000 initiative simultaneously builds professional capabilities and feeds the members of the Microsoft food chain with talent. The site itself is fed with traffic from job posting and banner ad campaigns all over the net. Microsoft understands that, in a labor shortage, the space between customers and employees is not the hard wall that it used to be. Spend some time investigating their site.

On the 3rd Party side, Matrix Resources sets a benchmark for delivering the same quality as Microsoft in a much narrower niche. With deep resources and training for the professionals they recruit, it is no wonder that they grow as rapidly as they do. Their web presence builds long term relationships with current and prospective employees.

Web Recruiting is all about building long term deep relationships. These operations all demonstrate effective approaches to executing the process.

The 1999 Electronic Recruiting Index covers these strategies in detail. Be sure to read the executive summary.

Tidbits

If you haven't yet had a chance to read the 1999 Electronic Recruiting Index Executive Summary, it will give you some context for our decisions

CareerBuilder continues to roll out its "network" with a very recent contract to do the USA Today employment section.

We're glad we didn't think of this. In a fit of bad taste, Bridgepath has published a list of potential jobs for Monica.

- John Sumser, © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

Recruiting Online:
Fall 1998 Seminar Series