Online Headhunters: Working to Find Work

With job markets skyrocketing from the surge in Internet startups, plenty
of dot-coms abound simply to fill positions. Anyone can hop online and type
such destinations as Monster.com, HotJobs.com or kforce.com, which exist to help clients
find work.


The concept may be a watershed in terms of winning over people skeptical on
the word “headhunter.” People who visit brick-and-mortar headhunters quickly
realize that they must first interview with the recruiter’s recruiter before
meeting the final recruiter. But with online staffing sites, clients can
skip this circle within a circle concept. For most of these businesses,
propsective clients have the autonomy. Rather than waiting for a person to
match a client with a firm, clients can go online, search from a list of
brick-and-click companies and submit a resumé. In due career
development
center fashion, these sites even explain how to build the resumé before
it
is sent.

Sure, all of these sites go a long way to hook people up with jobs. Titans
such as Amazon.com and America Online pay fees or have signed on for
special employer/employee packages to advertise their job boards and help
them find candidates. And there is no shortage of people looking for jobs,
or even just advice. Consider what has become the leader in the field —
Monster.com. To date, this behemoth said it holds more than six million job
seeker accounts, a resumé database with more than three million resumes
and
job opportunities from thousands of firms. According to Media Metrix,
Monster.com was the 87 most visited site on the Web in February.


But there is one key thing these dot-coms don’t do — tell people what a
specific company’s corporate culture is like — whether casual or formal
dress is required, whether the work atmosphere is hyper or relaxed, and
other kinds of specifics that only a person who is employed there would
know. And that is where WetFeet.com
comes in. Launched in 1994 as WetFeet Press Inc., co-founder and current
President Steve Pollock said the seed of WetFeet.com was planted shortly
after he graduated from Stanford business school. Recognizing that the job
searching process was not a user-friendly experience, Pollock and a friend
aimed to capitalize on the lack of help and advice in this sector.


“We did it for a lot of reasons,” Pollock said. “We weren’t getting a lot of
info about companies and no one else was doing it. Looking for jobs is a
very intimidating process and what we have doen is taken steps to lessen
that.”

They did oodles of research and created and sold career advice guides
featuring intimate corporate profiles. Looking to stay ahead of the business
curve, they went online in the summer of 1995, and have since taken off.
Pollock said WetFeet.com has increased in sales both from offline products,
including pamphlets and insider guides purchased internationally, and
online, where he said companies choose from a number of packages, with the
basic suite starting at $5,000. For this sum, firms get representation on
the site and online Q&A sessions with job applicants.


WetFeet.com boasts a number of brick and click corporate recruiters,
including Yahoo!, Charles Schwab Amazon.com. And similar deals with idealab!, BizBuyer and Asimba.com are on the way.


“These firms work with us to improve their recruitment efforts,” Pollock
said. “Together, we work hard to present balanced — both positives and
negatives are represented — assessments to help comp

anies get a better
hire.”


Apparently, the aforementioned businesses aren’t the only ones that put
stock in the staffing business. Last January, WetFeet.com was the recipient
of $9 million in investing led by venture capital firm Mohr, Davidow
Ventures to bolster their sales and marketing efforts. While this pales in
comparison to the $100 million co-branding deal inked between AOL and
Monster.com, it points to the fact that investors believe there is strength
in the online career dot-coms.

“The current job market is seeing a shift in the balance of power from
recruiters to the job seeker,” claimed Nancy Schoendorf, managing partner at
Mohr, Davidow Ventures.


Of course, every business model has its detractors. A recent kforce.com
study found that companies feel current online recruiting methods are devoid
of the personal touch normally associated with the staffing process.
Consequently, 61 percent of firms surveyed said online recruiters would best
be served by first personally speaking with and qualifies applicants before
passing the resume along. Translation: companies are receiving inordinate
numbers of resumés and would like to weed out many before continuing
the
headhunting process.


But accordingly, online recruiters are making adjustments. kforce counters
this deluge by bringing more than 2,000 recruitment specialists online to
screen candidates. And recently, WetFeet.com has taken steps to alleviate
this snafu by adding streaming video profiles. Ulitmately, these cyber
staffers say they will find the happy medium between headhunters and their
prey.

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